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Class _£S_35__ 
Copyright ]^° _1-^ ' - 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



A BATH IN AN ENGLISH TUB 



A BATH IN 

AN ENGLISH TUB 



By CHARLES BATTELL LOOMIS 

Author of " Minerva's Manoeuvres/' 
'' Cheerful Americans," etc 



Illustrated by Robert A. Grmef 




NEW YORK 

A. S. BARNES & COMPANY 

1907 



A FEW REMARKS 

There is nothing in this book that is 
calculated to anger people. During my 
visit to England I was seldom angered. 
I had a good time there and people went 
out of their way to make me happy, 
partly because I was an American but 
largely because I was my own sweet- 
tempered self. There is no asset so 
valuable to a traveler as a sweet temper 
and when I am abroad and have tem- 
porarily cast aside home burdens (such 
as furnaces and lawns) I am as gentle as 
Jane in the ballad. 

The English like us very much — 

much more than we like them. / 

vii 



A FEW REMARKS 

To be sure they unknowingly con- 
descend to us but it is perfectly easy for 
us to condescend in our turn. 

One of them once said to me, '' Haven't 
you any great painters ?'' 

'^Why there's Sargent; we think a 
good deal of him.'' 

'' But I thought he was an Englishman. 
He's at the head of our painters. I think 
he's an Englishman." 

*' Your thoughts, my dear boy, cannot 
alter his nationality." 

At another time one said, ""Why 
haven't you any great singers ?" 

''Isn't Patti great enough.^ She was 
a child in New York streets when she 
first began to sing. And are Eames and 
Nordica to be sneezed at ^ It is not 
respectful to sneeze at a lady." 

Again the Englishman supposed that 
all these voices were to be credited to 
Europe. 



Vlll 



A FEW REMARKS 

I took innocent pleasure in telling 
them that over a hundred years ago 
our Benjamin West was president of their 
Royal Academy, and that we took up 
Richard Wagner some time before the 
English did. 

I also recommended them to read 
James Russell Lowell's essay ''On a 
Certain Condescension in Foreigners." 

Still, I think that all nations will con- 
descend to all other nations until Gabriel 
begin his prefatory notes, so travelers 
may as well discount that little foible of 
human nature before starting out. 

The articles that go to make up this 
book came out orginally in the New 
York Sun and I enjoyed reading them 
exceedingly. 

But 

I only read one at a time. 

Verbum sap. 

If through reading these desultory 

comments on men and things in England 

ix 



A FEW REMARKS 

you are tempted to go there and you 
yield to temptation, I can only hope that 
you may have as good a time as I did. 

(There's more of my sweet temper; 
and the beauty of it is that it's perfectly 
genuine.) 

Charles Battell Loomis. 



CONTENTS 

A Bath in an English Tub 
Of Kings and Sightseers . 
The National Gallery and 

Americans; Also Tea . 

On Bluffing 

On Slumming 

Sequel to a Famous Ballad 
"An English Crowd Under De 

feat" 



Our Way and the British 
Too Much Shakespeariana 
''Croky'' vs. Motoring . 
When England Heats Up 



I 
13 

25 

38 
51 

63 

74 

87 

99 
117 

131 



A BATH IN AN ENGLISH TUB 




^^1h4- 



But, 



HAVE had a bath 
in an EngHsh tub 
and Fm going to 
tell you all about it. 

first let me make a confession. 

1 



dJ? 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

I was born in Brooklyn. 

You don't often hear a man who is 
living elsewhere voluntarily confess that 
he was born in Brooklyn. Those who 
still live there are case-hardened and 
make no bones of speaking of childhood's 
pleasant and exciting hours in Carroll 
Park; but those who have managed to 
escape generally try to create the impres- 
sion that they were born in Manhattan. 

Yes, I was born in Brooklyn, and I be- 
longed to that stratum of society that put 
cleanliness next to godliness and insisted 
on the Saturday bath. No matter who 
was visiting us, we children had to bathe 
every Saturday. We looked down on 
fortnightly bathers as persons of insuffi- 
cient culture. 

Time went on and someone introduced 
the custom of daily baths. This to my 
childish mind seemed to make the need 
of bathing at all quite superfluous. If 

one bathed every day one was clean all 

2 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

the time, and if one was clean all the time 
why bathe at all ? — a logic that did not 
convince those in authority over me. 

But in time I came to like my daily 
plunge in ice-cold Ridgewood water and 
felt it to be a luxurious necessity or a 
necessary luxury. 

When I came to England I was invited 
to spend a week-end in the country in a 
house three or four hundred years old. 
And they say that three or four hundred 
years ago stationary tubs were unknown 
and "running water'' referred to brooks, 
and was a poetical and not a plumber's 
term. 

At any rate, there was no bathroom 
and I wondered what I would do for my 
daily plunge. 

Just before retiring I noticed in a cor- 
ner of my room a large but shallow pan 
some three feet in diameter and quite 
round in shape. I wondered what it was 
for, and finally came to the conclusion 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

that It had been left in my room on its 
way to the attic and was probably the 
dish on which they brought in the 
roast in the time of Henry VIII. or 
his grandfather, James I. of sacred 
memory. 

By the way, let me take a side path 
here to enjoin upon my readers the neces- 
sity of an easy familiarity with historical 
personages. Most people know very 
little about history and care less; there- 
fore if you speak of bloody Edward VI., 
who stabbed Charles I. to the heart at the 
battle of Agincourt, or say that you have 
been wandering over the battlefield 
where Henry V. knighted Sir Walter 
Raleigh for the discovery of Virginia, you 
at once leap into favor as a writer whose 
history is a part of himself. 

But to get into the tub again. 

Next morning I was roused from a re- 
freshing slumber by a knock at my door. 
I supposed it was the getting-up knock 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

and sleepily responded ^'All right/' but 
a woman's voice murmured something. 

''What is it?" said I in some alarm. 
Perhaps the house was on fire. 

"Shall I come in?'' 

With an upward inflection. 

I could think of no reason why any one 
should come in so early in the morning, 
before the breakfast bell had rung, but I 
have little moral courage, and feeling 
quite sure that I was encountering 
an English custom, I pulled the drapery 
of my couch about me and said: 

"Why— er— yes." 

Then she came in — a ruddy-faced, 
buxom lass whom I recognized as the one 
who had brought me a siphon of vichy at 
bedtime the night before. 

"Do you wish a barth?" said she 
pleasantly. 

Without thinking I said I did, although 

I knew there was no "barthroom." 

"Shall I fix it for you?" 

5 



N ENGLISH TUB 

I must have murmured yes in a dazed 
sort of way, for she immediately came 
farther into the room and, going to my 
towel rack, she picked therefrom a crash 
towel fully as large as a silence cloth for a 
large dinner table. 

This she spread on the floor while I lay 
there blushing and watched her. 

Then she went to the corner of the 
room and picked up the big tin pan, and 
I at once realized that it was an English 
bathtub. Stupid me! Had I not seen 
pictures of them in English novels ? The 
maid now stepped out of the room and I 
began to breathe freely. 

But, just as I was preparing to leap 
from my bed and pour out water in my 
independent American fashion, she re- 
appeared and I bounded backward into 
bed and almost ''came a narsty fair* 
out the other side. 

This time she brought a tin ewer full 

of water, which she poured into the tub 

6 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

until the water was fully an inch deep. 

*'I guess ril be able to manage alone 
now/' said I, in a muffled tone from 
beneath the spread, but she was not yet 
through, and I began to shake. She 
was strong enough to have lifted me 
bodily into the bath, and Japanese 
influences are at work all over the world 
these days. 

However, all she wanted to do was to 
get me soap and a couple of towels, and 
then she left me with the inevitable 
"'Thank you" that well-trained English 
servants must say when they have done 
you a service under penalty of losing 
their self-respect. 

And when she went away I felt I was 
free to disport in the tub. Oh, how I rev- 
elled in that inch of water after the maid 
had gone and I had locked the door. 

I dived to the bottom of it, I rolled 
over and over in it until it was all on me 

and there was nothing left in the tub. 

7 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

And then I waited until the water had 
collected again in the tub and again I 
dived and came up blowing and sported 
like a stranded dolphin. 

And then I dried myself with a small 
washcloth, because it seemed wasteful 
to use a whole towel for such a purpose, 
and I had achieved my first English 
"baith/' 



I have referred to the English "Thank 
you.'' It is the most overworked phrase 
in use. In the first place they don't 
say ''Thank you" as we do in America, 
with a falling inflection. They throw it up 
in the air at you with a jerk. "Thang 
kew" expresses it phonetically, but no 
letters can express the little jerk of an 
inflection that they give to the "you.*' 
There is not a spark of gratitude in it 
as it is used by servants and trades- 
people. 

8 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

A maid brings you a cup of tea, and 
as she hands it to you she says ''Thang 
kew'\ You meet one in the hall and you 
say "Good morning. It's a pleasant 
day/' and she says ''Thang kew.'' 

I went into a shop on the Strand one 
day in order to be fleeced. Ameri- 
cans are fair game and, although I talk 
in a very low tone of voice (on purpose) 
and avoid saying '^caow'' and "guess'' 
they spot me for an American at once 
and proceed to do me. 

Massenger says it's because I go 
without a waistcoat. When it's hot 
weather in New York I go without a 
waistcoat (or vest, as I was brought up 
to call it), and why shouldn't I do it 
here when it's hot ? But I suppose it 
does betray my nationality almost as 
much as the wearing of the Stars and 
Stripes would. 

I went into this haberdasher's to buy 
an outing shirt. The shirt bought, the 
man said: 

9 . 



a 



AN ENGLISH TUB 



I have some Windsor ties that would 



interest you. 

"I have all I need/' 

*'Thang kew. Carn't I show you 
some 'angkerchiefs ?'' 

'^Not any handkerchiefs to-day." 

"Thang kew." 

No more emotion in his thanks than 
a professional ingrate would display. 
I verily believe that if I had given way 
to irritation at his reiterated phrase 
and had said, ^^Fll push your face 
in," he would have said, ''Thang 
kew," as he proceeded to show me 
something else I did not want to 
buy. 

But I want to tell you how easily 
shocked the good and aged Mrs. Grundy 
is when a person acts according to his 
inclinations instead of according to 
English precedent. 

I am a warm-blooded person, and 

when I tennis or wheel a jacket is a 

10 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

superfluity. In Connecticut I fling hat 
and jacket away as soon as I reach the 
hill country, and no one says a word 
unless it is a farmer who fears I will get 
a sunstroke. 

But over here, when I clad myself in 
a becoming outing shirt and started to 
get my wheel, I met in the hallway the 
same maid who had prepared my bath, 
and it was at once her turn to blush. 
She about-faced and retreated to the 
servants^ hall, and I later learned that 
she supposed that I did not expect or 
wish to be seen ^^so very incompletely 
dressed," as they say in "Pirates of 
Penzance." 

I was unconscious of any wrongdoing, 
and I went on my way rejoicing and 
joined the wheeling party at the barn — 
a party made up entirely of Englishmen. 

One of them knows me very well and 

he said, "Go back and get dressed." 

I turned it off^ with a laugh and we 
11 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

all mounted our wheels, but I noticed 
that all the men looked shocked — much 
as they would have looked if they had 
met their wives in evening dress on the sea- 
shore or in bathing costume at a dinner. 

But we would laugh at an English- 
man who did not dare go his own gait in 
America, particularly when this gait did 
not restrict the liberty of action of another, 
and so I went riding under the July sun. 

Very shortly my companions began 
to complain of the heat and to perspire 
like bread-earners, while I was cool and 
comfortable. But whoever we met, 
were they farm laborers, or motor 
cyclists or tramps, looked shocked 
when they saw me riding free and easy 
in a six-shilling figured linen outing 
shirt, and by the time I reached the 
end of the run I felt that I was a pariah. 

I would rather be a pariah and cool 

withal than to dwell in the jackets of 

hotness. Selah. 

12 



OF KINGS AND SIGHTSEERS 



^<^r 




W \ *1 r CAN understand why 

/' » we should venerate 

rjr old masters, but why 

we should venerate 
old mistresses passes me. And yet time 
does sanctify even naughtiness here in 
good old England. 

There have been ladies beloved of 
Kings of England and hated by the 

13 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

wives of said Kings, ladies whom, to 
say the least, you would not think of 
electing members of the Y. P. S. C. E. 
or the W. C. T. U. and whom Mrs. 
Grundy would frown lipon if she met 
them in a drawing-room to-day, ladies 
of the Nell Gwyn type, to take a mild 
example. 

But Nell Gwyn with her typic sisters 
lived many years ago. ''Ye'rs and 
ye'rs ago," as an Englishman would 
say, and time has mellowed her memory 
so that she has become a mildly titil- 
lating historic personage, and as such 
attracts the curious traveler from other 
lands. 

To me there is something almost 
humorous in the thought of a deacon 
and a vestryman from America going 
on a wheeling pilgrimage to the man- 
sion among the woods where rollicking 
Charles 11. housed the royal favorite 

and queen of the stage. 

14 



SIGHTSEERS 

Your host says: ''Now we might take 
either one of two rides to-day, both of 
them of historic interest. We can go 
to see the seven -hundred -year -old 
church at Aldworth, with its recumbent 
statues of the knights and ladies of the 
De la Beche family and its thousand- 
year-old yew tree, or we can take a 
somewhat longer ride to the house of 
Nell Gwyn of sainted memory/' 

The vestryman says, ''Seems to me 
we've seen recumbent statues in West- 
minster " 

"Yes," chips in the deacon, "and 
the longer the ride the better the exer- 
cise. Tve always been interested in 
poor Charles II. Seemed kind of hard 
he should lose his head." 

"Oh, it wasn't Charles II. that lost 
his head — that is, he only lost it figura- 
tively," says the vestryman, "but I think 
that it would make an interesting ride." 

"Look here," says the host, "Fd 
15 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

rather show you the old church. There's 
only a house where Nell Gwyn lived, 
and I believe it's occupied *' 

*' Suppose we flip a coin/' says the 
vestryman. 

The coin is flipped, with heads for 
Nell and tails for the knights and ladies, 
and to the delight of the Americans the 
choice falls on the house that Charles II. 
graced with his presence and wherein 
Nell Gv^n smiled on him. 

Time has whitewashed Nell and her 
sisters. Give Time time enough, or » 
if that is not suflScient give us the right 
kind of music, and any crime in the 
Decalogue is rendered interesting, until 
we find matinee girls at home and 
abroad revelling in the excesses of dear 
old demigods. 

I heard the other day that an Amer- 
ican rented a house for the summer sim- 
ply because the agent told him that it 

had been the scene of a murder of a 

16 



SIGHTSEERS 

celebrated king s celebrated mistress. 
The American thought it would be a 
good place to which to bring the children. 
The air was good, it was near the 
Thames and there is no way of learning 
history like being on the historic spot. 

His children were afraid to go up the 
back stairs on which the murder had 
been committed three hundred years 
before. 

Now, the house was palpably not fifty 
years old, but the agent knew his busi- 
ness. No one undeceived the American, 
and he and his family felt that they 
were in a way a part of the reign of 
Henry VHL, or whatever king it was 
who flourished in those times. 

By the way, some of the most hal- 
lowed associations that cluster around 
the venerable church at Ewelme in 
Oxfordshire arise from the fact that dear 
old Henry VIII. courted Anne Boleyn 

hard by, and they attended service 

17 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

together, both of them going in for 
Sunday observances to a large extent. 

How pretty the scene. Can we not 
all imagine it ? 

Henry breaking away from his retinue 
on a Sunday morning while the bells 
of Ewelme are answering those of Wall- 
ingford down by the river. A poppy 
in his buttonhole, he strides across the 
fields of manglewurzel to the sheltered 
village and makes his way through 
winding and narrow lanes, alongside 
which a fettered brook is babbling, to 
the seven-gabled house where Anne is 
boarding for the summer. 

Henry rings the bell in the door of 
the brick wall, half smothered in 
Virginia creeper, and sweet Anne her- 
self comes to the window. 

Henry doffs that historic cap of his 
and says: 

^^What say to a little touch of divine 

service this lovely morning, Anne ? By 

18 



SIGHTSEERS 

the way, Anne, do you pronounce your 
last name Bullen or Bolinn ?"' 

And Anne, all a-flutter at being so 
addressed by royalty, says: 

^'Say It as you will, my liege, and if 
you'll wait until my maid has strung 
my dimity bodice I'll be right glad to 
join you in your devotions. What do 
you think of the weather outlook ? Is 
the glass falling ? Shall I need an 
umbrella ?" 

^'The glass is rising, Anne. It's won- 
derful weather for England. But I 
anticipate storms before long." 

How prophetic the words ! 

Then Henry walks back and forth 
through the attractive village, all un- 
witting that eventually he is going to 
kill the pretty woman who is getting 
ready to go to church with him, and 
after half an hour or so Anne comes 
down and joins old Bluebeard, and 

hand in hand they walk through the 

19 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

colorful cornfields and are soon at the 
church porch. 

They pass the quintet of bell-ringers 
who jangle the bells at sight of royalty, 
and then they sit in the front pew and 
await the processional. And Henry 
finds the lesson for the day in his own 
copy of the King James version of the 
Bible, and they sing ^^ Onward, Christian 
Soldiers" and "Lead, Kindly Light '^ 
together, and as a bit of a joke the king 
puts a royal button into the collection 
pouch when it is passed to him and 
when service is over and the choir boys 
have left the chancel the congregation 
rises until Henry and Anne have passed 
reverently out. 

And they saunter through the fields 

and admire theClumps where the Romans 

used to have an encampment, and then 

Anne invites him in to Sunday dinner — 

roast beef and Yorkshire puddingy 

vegetable marrow and lemon squash. 

20 



SIGHTSEERS 

It's an idyllic picture and makes me 
wish Vd gone in for writing history. I 
don't wonder that Americans — the bet- 
ter part of whom were English then — 
like to go to the little church where 
that king who was most insistent on 
marriage of any king attended service 
in the long ago. 

There have been kings who have not 
confined themselves to the love of any 
one woman — Charles II. was a little 
inclined that way — but they have not 
been of the marrying kind. Good old 
Henry insisted on the ceremony. 

As he said to Cardinal Wolsey on one 
occasion: ''I may not make the best of 
husbands, Wolsey. There is a certain 
risk attending my loving of a woman, 
but no historian can ever arise who can 
truthfully say that I have not always 
insisted upon a full ceremony with both 
Mendelssohn's and the other fellow " 

"You mean Wagner, sire." 
21 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

*^Yes, both the wedding marches. 
Why, man, is it incumbent on a king to 
keep up a good custom — and placate 
Mrs. Grundy. If I had neglected to 
marry these Annes and Katharines, 
marriages might fall into disuse in this 
tight little island. No, while I live, 
Wolsey, ril keep you clergy busy earn- 
ing your fees.'' 

Tm not standing up for Henry. He 
did have his faults. He killed off far 
more wives than a self-respecting mon- 
arch should, but he upheld marriage 
to the end. 

But, as I said before, time is a very 
darky for whitewashing. If in New 
York crowds thronged to see the house 
where a man or woman was murdered 
(pictures of the same having appeared 
in the yellow press with a cross marking 
the spot), the respectable papers would 
all say editorially that only morbid or 
common persons ever care for such 

22 



SIGHTSEERS 

things. They would also say that to 
read about such things shows a vulgar 
mind that needs to be fed on sensa- 
tions. And in the news columns they 
would have a full account of the murder 
without the pictures. 

But shove the murder back a few cen- 
turies, make the murdered man a priest, 
and the crowd, moved by the holiest 
of historical feelings — the respectable 
editor among it — goes to see the place 
w^here he fe 1. And there is a cross to 
mark the spot, too. And children are 
encouraged to read the history of the 
event instead of reading novels. 

Yes, half the charm of sightseeing 
in dear old England lies in the fact that 
there are so many unworthies buried 
here and there, unworthies of both 
sexes, such slathers of murderers and 
mistresses hallowed in their tombs by 
kindly time. 

How thankful we ought to be, my 
23 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

dear brethren, that we live in a time when 
none of the commandments is ever 
broken. Time won't need to hallow 
us of the twentieth century. We are 
hallowed already. 



24 



THE NATIONAL GALLERY AND 
AMERICANS ; ALSO TEA. 





RELIGIOUS observance much 
indulged in by good Ameri- 
cans in London is a visit to 
the National Gallery. If you 
want to renew shipboard acquaintance- 
ships go to the National Gallery and 

25 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

wait. Just as in New York all people 
sooner or later pass the Flatiron build- 
ing, so sooner or later all Americans 
who have (or have not) a love for art 
come to the gallery to oflFer up their 
admiration before the works of the 
great masters of all countries (except 
America). 

I met one friend who told me with 
awe in his voice ''There's the Raphael 
that cost ;^25,ooo/' At the risk of 
offending him I hurried away from it 
without more than glancing at it, as the 
mention of the price seemed to cheapen 
it. 

I know a painting by Hogarth that I 
wouldn't swap for the ^25,000 Raphael, 
and I'm no blind admirer of the carica- 
turist either. It's his delicious '' Shrimp 
Girl," that is painted with a freedom 
and a joyousness that Raphael would 
have envied him the possession of. 

Because oftentimes when Raphael 
26 



NATIONAL GALLERY 

was painting for the smart set of his 
time he painted because he had to, and 
not because he wanted to, while Hogarth 
did that ^'Shrimp Girl'' because he 
couldn't help it. It is so much better 
than the much bepraised ^'Rake's Pro- 
gress" series, which was painted with a 
purpose. 

Please excuse me for foisting my 
views on you in this scandalous way. 
What I started to say was that the visiting 
of the National Gallery is a part (and 
oftimes the only part left) of the religious 
observance of traveling Americans. 

It's a harmless foible, but it is laugh- 
able none the less, because ninety out 
of a hundred of those who patter glibly 
about the merits of the landscapes of 
Constable and "old Crome," and Gains- 
borough, and who take the noble and 
sincere art of these men so seriously, 
would be surprised to learn that when 
they left the shores of their native 

27 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

America they were leaving behind them 
a native landscape art just as noble 
and sincere and quite as worthy to be 
taken seriously. 

It's a huge joke on the traveling 
American if he can point out to you 
(with the aid of the useful Baedeker) 
the merits that lie in a Constable and 
is unconscious that George Inness ever 
existed, or if he raves over the quality 
of a Crome and never heard of Wyant 
or gazes, guide-book in hand, at a Wil- 
son and is ignorant of the fact that 
Homer Martin was an American painter 
of such superlative parts that he is 
worthy to hang alongside of Constable 
and Rousseau and Corot and — and any 
landscapist who ever handled a brush. 

Spreadeagleism is a horrid thing, but 
recognition of the good things at home 
should come before adulation abroad. 

Am I not right ? 

Before you go abroad again on a shoe- 

28 



NATIONAL GALLERY 

wearing haunting of English and Con- 
tinental galleries, look up your Winslow 
Homers and your Keiths, and learn 
to your lasting astonishment that Amer- 
ican art is recognized in Europe (in 
Paris, for instance), and then take off 
your shoes (and stockings) and go 
wading in superlatives before the shrine 
of one of the great and admirable 
English masters if you wish to. 

Remember that we have had, and 
still have, masters in America, and that 
It is only a question of time when they 
will become old masters. 

Think of me talking right out in meet- 
ing and saying all this. Of course lots 
of you knew it already, but more of you 
didn't. 

It's not very many months ago that I 

had the pleasure of introducing the 

editor of an artistic New York monthly 

magazine to American art. Didn't know 

there was such a thing. 

29 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

Doubtless he'd taken off his shoes and 
walked softly before the examples of the 
Barbizon school to be found in so many 
American galleries, but that there were 
living and dead Americans who had 
looked with love and their own eyes on 
Nature and had painted her with as- 
surance and authority and dignity and 
sincerity — that was a revelation to him. 

The beautiful American woods are 
full of men like him. 



I suppose every writer who has come 
to England has had his say about the 
custom of tea drinking, but, after all, 
there are only a certain number of cus- 
toms in a country, and with people 
saying things about them all the time 
one must either cover old ground or 
else invent new customs to write about. 
One readily falls into the tea-drinking 
habit and I wish that it could be intro- 
duced into America. Of course swagger 

30 



NATIONAL GALLERY 

people drink tea now, but I was think- 
ing more especially of real Americans — 
and they don't do it. 

But here it fills in so many gaps. 

The other day I was spending a week- 
end along with Massenger at the country 
home a of well-known literary man. 

We had a hearty lunch (practically a 
dinner) at i o'clock and then went out to 
play tennis on a full stomach. Whether 
this is a widespread English custom or 
not I don't know, but it's a fact that one 
generally has a full stomach, if you will 
pardon my saying so, because the Eng- 
lish air gives one a tremendous appetite 
and English hospitality plies you with 
food, so to speak. 

We were all tennis enthusiasts and we 

played strenuously for some time, flying 

around the court quite as if we didn't 

remember when Lincoln was shot and 

had no recollection of the Reconstruction 

period. EngHsh air makes one feel young. 

31 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

While we were preparing to change 
sides the thought occurred to me that a 
glass of lemonade, or even ice-water> 
would be refreshing. As if in answer 
to my thought a bell rang from some- 
where in the house, and mine host said 
with gusto : 

''Ah, it's tea time." 

Down went the rackets, on went the 
jackets, and we all went into the dining- 
room we had left so short a time before 
and sat down to tea and bread and 
butter, and I accounted for my liking 
it from the fact that 260 years ago my 
ancestors were English. 

Tea over we went back to our game 
much refreshed and did not eat a hearty 
meal again until 7, and then — how hun- 
gry we were and how much there was to 
eat! But that is a digression. 

Another day I ran up to Oxford, or 
else I ran down — this question of up and 
down is very perplexing; you see a man 

32 



NATIONAL GALLERY 

riding down hill on a motorcycle and you 
learn that he is running up to London. 

Anyway I went to Oxford with Mas- 
senger, and, under the guidance of a don 
whom Massenger had once met in Con- 
necticut, we saw the beauties of the place 
(see Baedeker). A first folio Shakes- 
peare, formerly owned by one David 
Garrick, was rather impressive, and I 
think that's not in Baedeker. It is so 
refreshing to come across something 
that the omniscient Baedeker has missed. 

Another old thing that impressed me 
was the grass on the lawns. I under- 
stand that some of the blades date back 
to the time of Alfred the Great, and I 
can well believe it. They look old and 
sere. 

Massenger says they haven't had rain 
for a month, and that is why the grass 
looks antique. 

But to go back to tea. 

After we had made an end of sight- 
33 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

seeing we started for the station, intend- 
ing to take the 4:30. 

"We'll have time for tea on the way 
down there/' said the don. 

Massenger snorted, but it seems that 
dons don't understand the meaning of a 
snort, and we soon found ourselves in a 
quaint and dark little pocket of a parlor 
in which were bound volumes of Fun. 
(English fun, which is sometimes a rather 
superior article. Make up your mind 
for yourself about it and don't rely on 
Smith's say so.) 

"'Are you sure we'll have time ?" said 
Massenger after the don had ordered tea 
and buttered bread. 

''We'll have ample time, and anyway 
it's time for tea," said the don. 

That settled it. The train might 

come and go, but it was time for tea, and 

the laws of the Medes and Persians had 

a habit of altering not, like the leopard's 

spots. 

34 



NATIONAL GALLERY 

Speaking of spots, this certainly was a 
most inviting one, and when the tea and 
the daintily-buttered bread came they 
were very tempting, and so the don and I 
drank our tea. I regret to say that at 
the last moment Massenger had balked 
and had ordered a lemon squash instead. 

I believe he thought it would be a cross 
between a lemon pie and a squash pie, 
but it was merely the English for lemon- 
ade. Massenger has a good deal to 
learn. 

We lingered so long over our tea that 
when the don looked at his watch he 
said: 

''Lord bless me, we'll have to take a 
cab." 

Not five blocks away from the station 
and we'd have to take a cab! And Eng- 
land is a nation of walkers! 

However, it was not for me to say any- 
thing; so we took a cab for two shillings 
— in New York I have ridden fourteen 

35 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

miles on the elevated for five cents — and 
in a very short time we had missed our 
train and had settled with the cabman 
and had got somewhat heated sprinting 
from one ticket wicket to another to get 
tickets for our wheels, which we had left 
in the luggage room thinking we wouldn't 
need them in the colleges. 

"My word, that's too bad,'' said the 
don. "When does the next train 
go ?" 

He asked this of a guard and learned 
that we had half an hour to wait. 

"Oh, that's very nice. We'll have 
another cup of tea and cool off." 

And, do you know, I was glad we'd 
missed the train, for just then a boy came 
along trundling a tea barrow, (to give it a 
name,) and we sat there on the platform 
and had more tea and thin slices of but- 
tered bread, and forgot that we had been 
worried at missing the train, although 

every true American does hate to miss a 

36 



NATIONAL GALLERY 

train, even when they are running on a 
two-minute headway. 

Now, if they would only have little tea 
booths on Wall Street or State Street, 
and, say at a quarter to 3, when stock 
brokers are most excited, they all ad- 
journed for tea and filled the street with 
friendly little groups of perspiring and 
gray-templed men, they would go back 
to the closing exercises much relieved 
in body and mind, and there would be 
fewer breakdowns. 

But be sure to cut your slices thin and 
use plenty of butter. 

Why, even a shorn lamb would go up- 
town easier in his mind if the wolf who 
sheared him blew him off to tea. 

And the spectacle of a bull and a bear 
drinking tea amicably together would be 
a godsend to the Seeing New Yorkers. 



37 



ON BLUFFING 



x^^^ 







(^^^tCfi^r^^ 



RAN down a bit of 
unconscious humor 
in the London Tri- 
bune the other day. 
Their book-reviewer had come across 
*'an American book'' and had evidently 
read it, and was moved to show his 

knowledge of American geography. 

38 



ON BLUFFING 

In the first place he headed his review 
''A New Jersey Romance." Naturally, 
the American in London supposed that 
the book would treat of life in Rahway 
or Metuchen or some other town in New 
Jersey, and he began to read the review 
with interest. 

"'In her new novel Miss Margery 
Williams takes us back once more to 
the people of New Jersey. The scene 
is laid in a small New England port and 
the reader is never far from the sound of 
the sea." 

Think of New Jersey being a part of 
New England ! 

"Miss Williams knows New Jersey 
well." 

Not so the reviewer. If there is an 
Eastern State that isn't a bit like New 
England it is New Jersey. 

He goes on to say that " Miss Will- 
iams excels in the quality of ^atmos- 
phere,' and the descriptions of the New 

39 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

Jersey lanes and fields are among the 
best she has yet given us.'' 

What is this New England port that 
has strayed away like so many New 
Englanders and settled in New Jersey ? 
The reviewer calls it ''Port Gabriel," 
but that doesn't help one much. 

I spoke of this error to an English 
friend, and he said: 

''Oh, you know over here New Eng- 
land means all the East." 

That was worse yet, because your 
NewEnglander and your descendant of 
New Englanders is rather proud of the 
fact that New England contains but six 
rather small States. Ask a New Eng- 
lander in New Jersey if he is a "Jersey- 
man" and he will hasten to tell you that 
he was born in Massachusetts or what- 
ever one of the proud half-dozen he did 
come from. On the other hand, if you 
ask a Jerseyman in New England if he 

is a native New Englander he will be in 

40 



ON BLUFFING 

no haste to correct your mistake. 

Still the London reviewer knew as 
much about American geographical divi- 
sions as most of us know of English ones. 
The average New York reviewer is per- 
fectly capable of saying of an English 
book : 

"This idyllic little story has to do 
with Yorkshire folk and their lives amid 
the wild scenery of their Devon downs 
and Derbyshire glades, and the quaint 
descriptions of the Cornwall coast 
washed by the North Sea remind one 
of similar descriptions of the same coast 
by that master hand Charles Dickens. 
The curious Lancashire dialect is well 
handled and the story of the lives of 
these Yorkshire miners, lineal descend- 
ants, it may be, of Ham and Peggoty 
and Little Em'ly, holds one in willing 
thrall and makes one long to wander at 
will over the fair Essex meadows and the 
Berks seacoast.'^ 

41 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

We're always astounded and amused 
that the other man doesn't know the 
thing we know, but we are apt to think 
it of Httle moment that we don't know 
the thing the other man knows. 

Not to know a thing and yet to make a 
bluff of exact knowledge — sometimes 
leads to success and sometimes to 
laughter. 

Last winter when I was covering some 
of the 15,000 miles that Jerome K. 
Jerome and I travelled in America — 
where I re-learned geography every day, 
by the way — ^we were one day passing 
over a desert on a Southern Pacific train, 
and some one said that one could see a 
mirage from the train windows when the 
atmospheric conditions were favorable. 
Jerome was a little sceptical about this, 
so I turned to a colored porter and 
said: 

''Did you ever see a mirage .^" 

*'0h, yes, sah," came the answer as 

42 



ON BLUFFING 

quick as utterance could make it. 

"What's it like?" 

"LakaliTwolf, sah/' 

There was absolute ignorance palming 
itself ofF as knowledge. Napoleon 
would have promoted that porter and 
made an engineer of him at once, and he 
would in all probability have run our 
train on alien roads with a calm assump- 
tion that he must be right that would 
have given rise to no end of adventures. 

Up in South Dakota there was another 
man who always had an answer ready. 

He was a clerk in the hotel at which 
we were forced to stop (because the 
other one was worse yet), and just be- 
fore we went to the theatre to "deliver 
the goods'' I said to him: 

"Are the accoustics in the theatre 
good?" 

"Oh, yes, considering the size of the 



town." 



I've often wondered just what he 

43 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

meant. A few minutes later I changed 
the form of my question and said: ''Is 
it easy to make oneself heard in the 
theatre?" 

"Very easy, indeed/' said he, not 
knowing that he had already given one 
answer to my question. 

No, the English reviewer was quite 
right. He made a bluff at accurate 
knowledge of American geographical 
boundaries and no doubt impressed 
many untraveled Englishmen with the 
extent and variety of his attainments in a 
difficult field. 

Look at the American elevated guard. 
No one pretends to believe that he 
knows what he is saying. He says 
"Frank'n sh Ch'm'n'x" or "Fr^pl's 
C'n'x'' and people look out for the signs 
and get out as nearly right as they can. 

Over here it is quite different. 

You are going, let us say, from Pad- 
dington station to Wallingford. By 

44 



ON BLUFFING 

great good luck you strike the right 
platform to begin with. All arounr* you 
shrill whistles are shrieking until you 
long for the deep-toned chord whistles 
of American locomotives. 

You approach a guard and say, 
*^ Where do you change for Wallingford ?^ 

^Xh'inge at Didcot." 

This upsets you, because the friend 
in whom you trusted told you a name 
that sounded so like Chelsea that you 
immediately thought of Thomas Car- 

lyie. .... 

You wait until the guard isn't looking 
and then you go to an older and more 
important-looking guard and ask him 
the same question. 

"Ch'ingeatCholsey." 

Ah, Cholsey — that's the word that 
sounded like Chelsea. 

Still the first one said ^'Ch'inge at 

Didcot.'' You are tortured by doubts 

and you go to a porter who is trying to 

45 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

trundle a barrow-load of trunks up the 
platform without cutting any one's foot 
off — ^with bare and fright-producing suc- 
cess — and you plop out at him the same 
question. He stops so suddenly that a 
trunk falls off his load and smashes a 
valise. 

'^I think you ch'inge at Didcot, sir.'' 

There you have it. Those men have 
Didcot on the brain. 

You can't appeal to a dignified con- 
ductor when he comes through the train 
to take your ticket, because in the first 
place he can't come through the train, 
the carriages being of the old compart- 
ment type, and in the second place there 
is no conductor, and anyway you have 
to hold on to your ticket until you are 
in the station, right or wrong, at which 
you elect to alight. 

The train backs in, you take your 

seat, the guard, a diflFerent one, slams 

the door and you ask him through the 

46 



ON BLUFFING 

open sash the same old question and get 
for answer, ''Ch'inge at Cholslee/' a 
variation in pronunciation that further 
puzzles you. 

You appeal to your fellow-passengers, 
but those that aren't Americans are Lon- 
doners out for a bank holiday, and what 
your Londoner doesn't know of "the 
provinces'' it would take a Macaulay 
to teach him. 

You watch out for the names of the 
stations. One seems to be Cadbury and 
another somebody's pills and another 
Peter's Choc 

Oh, it's only advertisements. 

You seem so shut in that you know 

you'll never know when you get to your 

destination. At last you come to a stop, 

and then the engine shrieks and then 

shrieks again, this time further off, and 

at last you see it with your train behind 

It rushing around a curve in the distance. 

And you are left in the station in the 

47 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

coach to which you blindly rushed. 

Is it Didcot ? No; it's Beecham's . 

No, it's Tilehurst. 

Here's a pretty how-de-do! And you 
were to be met at Wallingford by your 
host's dogcart. 

The Americans in the carriage swarm 
out and try to obtain information, but 
the Englishmen sit quietly with a patient 
faith in the system that is noble, and in 
a half hour or so another train backs in 
to the station and picks you up and you 
wonder at the carelessness of railroad 
officials in letting you lie on an exposed 
track in that way with expresses passing 
every few minutes. 

Still you're not much better off now 
that you're moving, for you don't know 
yet where you are to change and you've let 
one train slip by without effort to stop it. 

Ah, you are approaching a station and 
your quick eye notes the name of Didcot 

among the advertisements. 

48 



ON BLUFFING 

You have now approached a crisis in 
the ailment. On obtaining right an- 
swers to your questions depends the 
successful issue out of all your troubles. 

A new guard comes by. 

""Do I change here for Wallingford ?'' 

''No, ch'inge at Cholsey.'' 

As your friend in whom you trusted 
said in the first place. 

What a pity you didn^t take the right 
car and go on to Cholsey with the rest 
of your train. 

At Cholsey you take good care to 
change, and there is a dear little train 
puffing and squealing in its anxiety to 
take you to Wallingford. 

You prepare to excuse yourself for 
having let the train in which you left 
London get away without you, and you 
deplore the stupidity on your part that 
has kept your friend waiting over a train 
for you. 

Five minutes or so and you are in 

49 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

quaint old Wallingford, with its thatched 
cottages and red-tiled roofs, and there 
is your friend just driving his dogcart 
into the station yard. 

A minute later and it^s: 

^'Ah, glad to see you, old chap. 
Afraid you might make a mistake, bank 
holiday time. It's a bit confusing. But 
you made it like an old hand." 

And then you learn that you were on 
what is called a slip car and that it was 
all right to be dropped at Cadbury — I 
I should say Bovril, oh, Tilehurst, I 
mean, and that you came through quite 
as it was intended by the English system 
that you should. And no one has been 
insolent to you. 

That counts in the long run. And it 
seemed a very long run to Wallingford, 
owing to your uncertainty and the 
proximity of the advertisements to the 
station names. 



50 



ON SLUMMING 




CA9(0t^^ 



|NE hot day last week I felt 
that I had been cheerful 
long enough in the pleasant 
English sunshine and the peaceful 
orderliness of English country life. 

I wanted a change. I wanted to be 
treated to a horrid sensation. I wanted 
to see one of the saddest, most vice- 
haunted, sodden, foul, pestilential, dark, 

dismal, dreadful human hives in Chris- 

51 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

tendom; a place which, famous already, 
had been made more famous by the 
exploits of one Jack the Ripper; a place 
where laughter is unknown and where 
no gleam of sunlight ever penetrates. 
In a word I wanted to see Whitechapel 
— the East End. 

And so I left the hedge-bounded, 
poppy-bedecked fields and sheep-be- 
sprinkled meadows of the English coun- 
tryside and went up to London. 

My guides were two English writers 
whose names, etc., etc. 

One was of the sad-faced type, the 
other was rubicund and jolly. 

At the last moment we decided not to 
incite the fury of the mob by wearing silk 
hats and frock coats. Instead we wore 
clothing of innocuous and unfashionable 
cut, and taking our lives in our hands 
we set forth from the neighborhood of 
the Hotel Cecil in the Strand in a bus. 

As the afternoon was to be a long one, 

52 



ON SLUMMING 

one of my friends suggested that we 
should not confine ourselves to any one 
neighborhood, but take a walk through 
London streets wherever his fancy — 
and he is a man of delicate fancy — 
might lead him to go. We consented, 
and after riding for half an hour or so 
we dismounted and found ourselves in 
a quarter where the respectable poor 
live. 

I noticed that the respectable poor 
looked much like thousands of New 
Yorkers whom I have seen; in fact, I 
could hardly believe that I was not in 
New York. But the streets were much 
cleaner than similar quarters would be 
in New York, and there was compara- 
tively little odor of an unpleasant 
nature. 

We walked through narrow alleys 
and encountered David Warfield after 
David Warfield — long-bearded, sallow- 
faced American citizens with the am- 

53 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

bition and the determination to become 
rich. I asked my friends if these were 
really Londoners and they assured me 
that they were — of the lineage of David, 
an earlier David than Warfield. 

Little children played in the gutters 
and were happy. The summer sun, 
the genial London sun, illuminated the 
narrow streets and housewife said to 
housewife in the pleasant New York 
or Yiddish tongue that it was a long 
time between rains. 

I felt that it would be a good thing if 
the people who live in that vile White- 
chapel could come to this place to live; 
all seemed so quiet and respectable. 

One of my companions asked me if I 

would like to see how they made London 

citizens out of Jewish children, and 

upon my saying I would, he took us to 

a school nearby in which we heard 

the cheerful hum of many youthful 

voices. 

54 



ON SLUMMING 

A pleasant-faced, rosy-cheeked gen- 
tile, the principal of the school, who 
looked as if he spent his days in the open 
fields, greeted us cordially and on our 
asking to see the newest arrivals he took 
us into one of the primary departments. 

Here were assembled some fifty He- 
brew boys from seven to ten years old. 
Nearly every one had keen, alert, bright 
eyes and some were cherubic enough 
to have sat as models for angels. 

''All boys who were not born in Eng- 
land will come forward,'' said the prin- 
cipal. 

Eight or ten little chaps rose and 
came forward quite fearlessly. It looked 
to me as if there wete no terrorism in 
that school. I did wish they might 
have such institutions for the poor little 
East End children. 

''Where were you born V asked the 
principal of one boy. 

"In Russia." 

65 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

''How long have you been in Eng- 
land?" 

''One year." 

"How old are you ?" 

"Ten/^ 

"Can you read and write ?'* 

"Yes, sir." 

Several of them had been born in 
Africa, and yet to my American eyes 
they showed no evidence of negro blood. 
And then I realized that Africa is a 
large place, and it turned out that these 
were the sons of English Jews who had 
settled in South Africa but who had left 
it on account of the Boer War. 

Most of these children were almost as 
happy-looking as the average Christian 
child, and yet the advantages of Chris- 
tianity are denied them as they are Or- 
thodox Jews. 

In another room we met a little 

Hebrew thirteen years of age who wrote 

a most legible hand and expressed him- 

56 



ON SLUMMING 

self (in compositions on ''How I Spent 
My Vacation'') in good, clear English 
with here and there a foreign idiom. 
He looked like a poet in embryo, this 
Hebrew lad, with dreamy eyes and seri- 
ously-happy face, and he had spent his 
vacation by taking walks through West- 
minster Abbey — where he must have 
come across the statue of a brilliant 
Israelite named Disraeli — and by visits 
to the National Gallery, and he showed 
an interested acquaintance with the 
works of dead and gone British authors. 
And he had been out of Russia only 
eleven months ! 

I thought it was a rather better fate 
than being butchered to make a Russian 
holiday. 

I winked at sundry Hebrew lads and 
they winked back quite as if the joy of 
life were in them. Oh! thought I, if 
they could only introduce something 
like this to the poor, submerged millions 

67 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

of the East End! We also visited the 
Church of St. Columbia, in which is a 
mortuary for the use of those who, liv- 
ing in cramped quarters, have no place 
in which to lay their dead until the time 
of interment. And they told me that 
the poor could hardly ever be induced 
to give up their loved ones. 

But I was beginning to get tired of 
this respectable slumming. One can 
get worse than this in New York. I re- 
solved to suggest the East End as soon 
as I could do it, although my guides 
seemed to be enjoying themselves in 
showing me the houses of the lower 
middle classes. 

At last we came to a dreadfully com- 
monplace street, the sort of place where 
you'd feel you could safely leave 
your little son, aged five, for an hour 
or two. 

"Oh, say,'' said I, '^please don't give 
me any more of these Sunday-school 

58 



ON SLUMMING 

streets. I want to see carnage and mur- 
der and rapine. I've got to write a let- 
ter to America depicting the horror of 
Whitechapel. I'll willingly risk my life 
in going through some of the murderous 
streets, but another half-hour of this 
Philadelphia neatness and quiet will 
affect my nerves." 

And then I learned that things are 
seldom what they seem. 

''This is considered the toughest 
street in London," said one of my friends, 
whose books on cockney life have made 
him an authority on the subject. "When 
Barrie took Maarten Maartens through 
this street some years ago they had a 
detective in advance and a detective 
behind them who told them to be as 
cautious as a Scotchman and a Dutch- 
man could." 

"Well, but aren't there just as dan- 
gerous streets as this in the awful East 

End, in Whitechapel V' asked I. 

59 



AN ENGLISH TUB 



They both looked at me in astonish- 



ment 



What's the use of trying to entertain 
you?" said one, ''we've been in the 
East End ever since we alighted. We've 
been in Whitechapel, in the East End, all 
this warm afternoon and here you are 
asking for something worse. Your 
palate is out of order." 

''But," said I, "the streets are cleaner 
than those on the East Side in New 
York." 

"That's the lookout of the New York 
Street Cleaning Department. It doesn't 
concern London," said one. 

" But the children look happy." 

"That's owing to the mercy of God," 
said my other friend. 

"And it looks as if they were being 
cared for," I continued. 

"You think that because you're an 
irrepressible optimist. We've taken you 
through the saddest part of the British 

60 



ON SLUMMING 

Kingdom and you say that it is better 
tlian similar places in New York. 
Where's your patriotism, man ?" 

^'But we've not been in danger of 
assault/' said I, ignoring his slur. 'Tve 
not seen a black look or heard an angry 
word, or even an oath, this afternoon." 

^^ Because we've minded our own busi- 
ness. You go through here in evening 
clothes and pull your overcoat about 
you every time you pass a man and you 
may be ripe for the mortuary at St. 
Columba's in a few hours." 

"Well, but Jack London came over 
here and saw it, and he pictured it as a 
hell on earth." 

''Jack London would be able to find 

a 'Hell's Kitchen' in heaven because 

he has a trained scent for that sort of 

thing, but you must remember that he 

dug up every dreadful story he could 

sniff out and dumped them all in one 

locality. The most dreadful place on 

61 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

the face of the earth is in Jack London's 
book. Probably if you wrote a book 
about the East End there'd be a rush 
of emigrants to it from all parts of the 
earth. Something between your optim- 
ism and his pessimism would be the 
right thing." 

I couldn't help feeling disappointed 
(the sensational part of me) that I had 
witnessed no murders, not even a wife- 
beating or eye-blacking, and if I had not 
afterward substantiated the fact that I 
had really been in Whitechapel I would 
have had a suspicion that my friends, 
being humorists, had been stringing me. 

It begins to look as if sightseers were 
going to have all the festering sores of 
civilization removed, and we'll have to 
look to our imaginative literary men for 
our Whitechapels of the future. 

Perhaps it is better for the East Ender 

and the East Sider, but it is going to 

make it very tame for slummers. 

62 



SEQUEL TO A FAMOUS BALLAD 









1 



^^^ ^TT^ ^^ other day I was talk- 

ing with a member of 
one of those Browning 
societies that will per- 
sist in reading meanings into his poetry 
that he never intended to put there. 

In the course of our amicable con- 
versation I said that Browning had no 

more business than Byron had to write 

63 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

doggerel, and that he ought to have taken 
too keen a pride in his craft to ruin what 
might have been a fine handling of the 
''Pied Piper of HameHn" subject. 

Of course he gasped and of course he 
asked me to admire the clever rhymes, 
and naturally I told him that the rhymes 
were the ruination of it, that a clever 
writer of burlesque verse like W. S. Gil- 
bert with his irreproachable ear could 
have given him valuable points. I asked 
him what excuse there was for a man 
with any ear making ''Mile hence'' 
rhyme with "silence" or "sun shone" 
with "luncheon." 

Then he said it was only a child's 
story. 

"So much the worse. One should be 
most careful of his rhymes when writing 
for innocent children, who may have been 
brought up on Whittier, that good but 
earless poet." 

Many people take the "Pied Piper" 

64 



A FAMOUS BALLAD 

to be the entrance to Browning and they 
turn around in the porch and depart from 
his work forever — depart from the man 
who wrote "Cahban on Setebos/' 
"Childe Harold to the Dark Tower 
Came/' and ''Andrea del Sarto/' to say 
nothing of the spirited and quite inimit- 
able ballad of "Herve Riel." 

Even we who are not Browning stud- 
ents remember ''Herve Riel" that used 
to be recited at commencements by the 
boy who had not chosen ''Henry of 
Navarre" or "Lady Clare." 

On the sea and at the Hogue, sixteen hundred 

ninety-two, 
Did the English fight the French — woe to 

France! 
And the thirty-first of May, helter skelter through 

the blue. 
Like a crowd of frightened porpoises a shoal of 

sharks pursue, 
Came crowding ship on ship to Saint-Malo 

on the Ranee, 
With the English fleet in view. 

Well begun, it so continues to the end, 

65 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

one of the finest ballads in the English 
language. 

It tells how the French fleet under 
Damfreville, pursued by the English, 
comes to a place like our own Hell Gate 
and is like to be caught in a trap and 
blown up by the enemy's guns. 

The local pilots come aboard and 
quickly decide that it is quite impossible 
to guide such unwieldy vessels through 
the rocky, treacherous channel. 

''In a strait" in every sense of the 
word, Damfreville decides that it is 
better to run the ships ashore and blow 
them up than allow them to become the 
prizes of the hated English. 

He is about to give the word when : 

* * * up stood * * * out stepped * * * in 

struck 

* * * a simple Breton sailor pressed by Tour- 

ville for the fleet, 
A poor coasting pilot, he — Herv§ Riel, the 
Croisickese. 

Herve Riel offers in his simple 

66 



A FAMOUS BALLAD 

French (rendered into nobly simple 
English by Browning, who must have 
enjoyed his morning's work while he 
wrote at white heat) : 

"Only let me lead the line, 

Have the biggest ship to steer, 
Get this Formidable clear, 

Make the others follow mine. 
And I lead them, most and least, by a passage 

I know well, 
Right to Solidor past Greve, 

And there lay them safe and sound: 
And if one ship misbehave — 

Keel so much as grate the ground — 
Why, I've nothing but my life, here's my head!" 

cries Herve Riel. 

What he has promised he well per- 
forms : 

Not a ship that misbehaves, not a keel that 

grates the ground. 
Not a spar that comes to grief! 
The peril, see, is past. 
All are harbored to the last. 
And just as Herve Riel hollas "Anchor!" — 

sure as fate. 
Up the English come — too late! 

Now is Herve Kiel's golden hour. He 

is the hero of the day, and what he asks 

67 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

for that can he have from his grateful 

compatriots. 

What a shout, and all one word, 

•'Herve Kiel!'* 

As he stepped in front once more 

Not a symptom of surprise 

In the frank blue Breton eyes, 

Just the same man as before. 

Then Damfreville, emotional French- 
man that he is, says finely: 

'*You have saved the King his ships, 
You must name your own reward. 
Faith, our sun was near eclipse! 
Demand whate'er you will, 
France remains your debtor still. 
Ask to hearths content and have! Or my name*s 
not Damfreville.*' 

And what does the simple-hearted 
Breton sailor do ? He bursts out laugh- 
ing through his rough beard. He wants 
no reward for doing what (later) England 
expected every man to do — according to 
Nelson ; 

•* Since 'tis ask and have I may; 

Since the others go ashore — 

Come! A good whole holiday! 

Leave to go and see my wife, whom I call the 

Belle Aurore!'* 
That he asked and that he got — nothing more. 

68 



A FAMOUS BALLAD 

It's a splendid poem and well wipes 
out the memory of ^'The Pied Piper of 
Hamelin/' with its bastard rhymes, but 
almost every one has wondered that Dam- 
freville was so literal. Why did he take 
the innocent pilot at his word ? Why 
did he not throw in a purse ? Browning 
himself received a hundred guineas for 
the poem and he sent every penny of it 
to the relief of starving Frenchmen 
('twas just after the siege of Paris). 

But Damfreville gave the pilot '' a day 
off." 

And who knows what happened when 
the light-hearted, brave fellow came to 
the door that gave entrance to the one 
whom he called ''the Belle Aurore" ^ 

Lofty-minded men do not always have 
lofty-minded wives. We all remember 
Socrates and his wife, who, even as Lot's 
wife has stood for all time as one of the 
salts of the earth, stands for eternity as 

one of the scolds of the earth. 

eg 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

At first the Belle Aurore was desper- 
ately glad to see Herve. She allowed 
him to fold her in his arms and then she 
escaped, that she might be enfolded 
again, and she kissed him, French 
fashion, first on one cheek and then on 
the other (how Biblical French customs 
are!) though FU wager that he, being a 
sailor, kissed her square on the mouth. 

But soon she began to question him. 

I wish I might put her questions in as 
spirited verse as that of Browning, but it 
would take more time — and one or two 
other factors — than I have this morning, 
and, besides, people would be sure to be 
prejudiced in his favor as against me. 

First she questioned him for news from 
the seat of war. Then she asked him 
how it was that battle business was so 
slack that he could come all the way 
down to see her. 

Glowing with innocent pride, now that 
he was telling of it, although hitherto it 

70 



A FAMOUS BALLAD 

had seemed the only thing for anyone to 
do who had his knowledge of shoals and 
eddies and tides, Herve Riel tells his 
wife. that he has saved the French fleet. 
His eyes shine — ^they moisten a bit; these 
French are an emotional lot — and word 
for word he tells her what the great 
Damfreville said. Actually the Admiral 
of the whole fleet said to him, plain 
Herve Riel, coast pilot: 

"You have saved the King his ships. 
You must name your own reward/' 

The Belle Aurore begins to breathe 
hard at this. She glances around the 
miserable cottage and thinks of the 
handsome villa of my lady 'Ma com- 
tesse." She can compass all those fine 
airs herself, give her time. And some 
money shall go to the poor. And a 
candle seven feet tall will she give to Our 
Lady. Ah, what a brave, lucky hus- 
band! How she will queen it over those 

Videaus, who give themselves such airs 

7i 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

because their father found buried treas- 
ure in the new world. 

''Quick, what did you choose, my 
dear Herve, title and money or only the 
money?'' 

He hesitates and she divines that he 
did not choose a title. 

" Perhaps it is better so,'' says she, her 
soft arms around his neck. ''We are 
simple folk. But show me the purse. 
And where are we to live ?" 

Poor Herve's jaw drops. He had not 
foreseen this. Why did he not wait to 
ask her if she wanted anything besides 
glory ? 

He stammers. He attempts to laugh. 
He fetches a huge sigh and begins to 
stroke her head. 

She receives an inkling of the truth 
from all this. 

Her arms drop from his neck and she 
stands up to him, her eyes flashing. 

"Do you mean to say, you Herve Riel, 

72 



A FAMOUS BALLAD 

you poor good-for-nothing, ne'er-do-well 
of a pilot, that you have asked for neither 
title nor purse ?'" 

He shrugs his shoulders and throws 
out his hands. 

''What could I think of Better than the 
sight of you, my dear, my Belle Aurore ? 
As I live, all that I wished for was leave 
for a good, whole holiday with you/' 

And then the storm burst! 



73 



AN ENGLISH CROWD UNDER 
DEFEAT." 









DETERMINED to go to 
see the Cambridge-Har- 
vard boat race on the 
Thames for two reasons— it would bring 
m.e into contact with some of my fel- 
low-countrymen, and it would give me 
a chance to see how Englishmen bore 
themselves under defeat. 

It was one of the hundred days of 
loveliness that England has had be- 
stowed upon her this summer by the 

74 



AN ENGLISH CROWD 

clerk of the weather, and as I took my 
way down to ugly Hammersmith Bridge 
I could not help thinking how lucky the 
Americans were in having such a day in 
which to polish off their redoubtable 
adversaries. 

Friendly eyes looked on me and on all 
Americans present, even the noisy ones. 
England was perfectly willing to have us 
win. All she asked for was a close 
race. 

The course lay from Putney Bridge to 
Mortlake, a distance of four miles, and 
two hours before the race a large and 
cheerful crowd made up of English and 
Americans was walking along the tow- 
path in search of points of vantage from 
which to view the struggle. 

Cockney venders were selling their 

idea of crimson. In justice to them I 

must say that they are all colorblind, for 

from brown to pink every hue could be 

seen with never a touch of crimson. 

75 



a 9 

5> 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

Ere's yer ^ Award colors! Pick 'em 
out/ 

But no American could do so. Luck- 
ily I had got my bit of crimson elsewhere. 

From just above Hammersmith Bridge 
for a mile the embankment was lined 
with vociferous men who dealt in 
strangely named drinks and edibles. 

There was a beverage that went by the 
name of sarsaparilla wine. It was yel- 
low and was sweetened by the addition 
of sugar if desired. Your Englishman 
has a contempt for sweets that is being 
gradually overborne. Some years ago 
he would have taken his sarsaparilla 
wine dry. 

"Maizypop" had a strangely famil- 
iarly unfamiliar sound, and I bought a 
package to see what it was like. Popped 
maize or popcorn it proved to be. As 
corn is the generic name for all grain in 
England, popcorn would not be under- 
stood of the masses, so the beautiful 

76 



AN ENGLISH CROWD . 

word ^'maizypop^' is coined and the 
article sells. 

Booth after booth was filled with 
racks containing cocoanuts in place of 
*' coons'^' heads. If you hit the "coker- 
nut^' with a ball provided for the purpose 
it became your property. 

I longed to try my luck, but I did not 
know what I should do with half a dozen 
cocoanuts, so I refrained. 

There were those who had paid good 
prices in advance for seats from which 
to view the race, but I was there to view 
the crowd as well, and as long as I was 
near at hand when the Harvard crew 
won I did not much care where I was. 

But I fell in with two pleasant fellow- 
countrymen, strangers, and we listened 
to the blandishments of a witty coster- 
monger whose little donkey cart was 
part of a procession of carts and wagons 
drawn up at the top of the embankment, 
and for a shilling and sixpence we ob- 

77 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

tained elevated seats that commanded 
a view of a mile of the river. A better 
place we could not have asked for or 
obtained at ten times the price. 

I made up my mind to sink all feelings 
of pride in my rowing compatriots when 
they should come, and simply give my- 
self up to a calm contemplation of the 
Englishmen about me. 

It was a good-natured crowd, as good- 
natured as a New York one out for a 
holiday and not trying to get to Brooklyn 
by way of the Bridge. 

My neighbor in the next cart, an 
Englishman, told me that he hoped it 
would be a close race, and I echoed his 
hope. I really did not want to see 
Cambridge trailing along a half-mile 
after our boys. There is no excitement 
in such a race. And I told him that next 
to seeing Harvard win Td be best 
pleased to see Cambridge win. 

"But there are only two crews, you 

78 



AN ENGLISH CROWD 

know/' said he, and my little joke lay in 
the bottom of the cart, demolished. 

A party of Harvard men, in a barouche 
went by and spotted my two companions 
and me for Americans, and gave us a 
cheer that caused the quiet English 
people to look amazed. But they smiled 
indulgently. It was only a little pre- 
enthusiasm. 

My unknown friends were from the 
West, and they, like myself, had come 
to see how an English crowd would bear 
itself in defeat. 

We were all sure that the English 
would bear themselves like true sports 
and we all established very friendly rela- 
tions with the Britons about us in the 
hour and a half that elapsed before the 
dropping of a flag on Barnes Bridge told 
us that the race had begun. 

Now was my chance to watch the 
English and see whether they were the 
phlegmatic people they are reputed to be. 

79 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

Could they bear to be wiped off of the 
river by a little university only 270 
years old that day ? Wouldn't they 
make a scene ? For myself I was going 
to be the calm, stlf-possessed, disin- 
terested spectator of an international 
event. 

The course, ably policed by the 
Thames Conservancy, had been cleared 
some time before, and but six or seven 
launches were to be allowed to follow the 
rowers. 

We stood up in the donkey cart, the 
crowds in the street craned their necks, 
people in an unfinished building leaned 
from the windows and the mob on the 
river bank risked being pushed into the 
historic but damp stream — and the race 
was on. 

I fixed my eyes on the bend of the 
river, where the shells would shortly 
appear, until I remembered that I was 
not there to look at the boats, but to note 

80 



AN ENGLISH CROWD 

the behavior of an English crowd under 
defeat. 

Thus reminded of them I turned my 
head and watched them until my eyes 
happened to fall on the river again and 
refused to budge from that bend beyond 
which two world-watched crews were 
putting their six wrecks of training into 
the work of rowing a great race. The 
thought came that at that very moment 
people in America, in India, in Aus- 
tralia, in Canada, in South Africa were 
anxiously awaiting news of the event that 
was now unfolding itself on the river 
before me. 

But it did not seem a bit real. I 
seemed to be in a theatre with my eyes 
riveted on the first public view of the 
biograph or kinetoscope. The crowd 
around me was not a real crowd but only 
the wonderful moving picture of a crowd. 
I myself was real, but the shining water, 
the waving flags, the silent people were 

81 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

all parts of a picture of a scene, not the 
scene itself. 

And then I heard a queer noise like 
the sound of the wind in distant trees 
before the storm breaks. It came from 
beyond that fascinating bend in the river. 
What was it ? 

It was the sound of cheering. My 
compatriots were cheering American 
cheers. It must be that. 

One of the Westerners had a field 
glass and suddenly he said, ^^Here they 
come!'* 

And then I saw two moving shuttles 
in the water far away and the cheering 
came nearer and nearer and increased in 
volume and proportion. One of the 
shuttles was ahead, and I knew it was 
Harvard and fell to cheering myself. I 
forgot for the moment all about the 
English around me. My one desire 
was do the best American cheering that 

my lungs and throat could compass. 

82 



AN ENGLISH CROWD 

I was subconscious that everybody 
around me was cheering and my heart 
warmed to the English under defeat. 

Suddenly, like a blow between the 
eyes, I heard one of the Westerners say, 
"'Cambridge leads/' 

I borrowed his glass and looking 
through it I noticed, just as one notices 
a bad symptom in the disease of a loved 
one, that the blades of the oars in the lead 
were a light blue and my heart sank. 
Had our boys come 3,000 miles for 
nothing ? No, they had come 3,000 
miles to make a good fight with redoubt- 
able antagonists and they were mak- 
ing it. 

But still it did not seem like a real 
thing, the cheers or the sight of the tiny 
shells in that water so far away. And the 
speed they were making, both crews, was 
out of all proportion to the size of the 
river. Why the tugs and steamers that 
followed were going at a tremendous 

83 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

and noisy pace and yet they did not gain 
on those two quiet crews. It all seemed 
like a dream. 

The shouting and the tumult died 
not. It increased in power and the 
Cambridge men swept inevitably past 
with the Harvard men, doomed from 
the first stroke to defeat, rowing tre- 
mendously two lengths behind — only 
two lengths in a fast four-mile race — 
and my throat gave me notice that it 
was being overworked and that anyway 
cheering w^ould do no good now. 

And then the rival crews grew smaller, 
and smaller, and smaller and finally dis- 
appeared around another bend in the 
river, and a few minutes later pande- 
monium reigned among the phlegmatic 
English. And on the flagstaff in the 
middle of Barnes Bridge two flags were 
flying, the lower one being a familiar 
white '^H" on a crimson field, but the 
flag at the top, being light blue, in token 

84 



AN ENGLISH CROWD 

that English Cambridge had defeated 
American Cambridge. 

And now the Englishman next to me 
turned and grasped my hand in a good, 
warm, hearty handclasp and said: 

*^ Never mind, my boy. It was a good 
race. Better luck next time." 

And I thanked him, hardly knowing 
what I said, and bade good-bye to my 
new-found friends and jumped from the 
cart, actually as sorry as if I had been a 
Harvard man or especially interested in 
athletics — or had money on the race. 

I continued to wear the Harvard 
colors — in memory of the defeated — 
and more than once an Englishman 
stepped up to me and said w^ords of 
right good sport. One said: ^' Never 
mind, bring 'em over next year and let's 
'ave another try," quite as if I could 
bring it about. 

And, as part of the good-natured 
English crowd, I made my slow way 

85 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

back along the towpath to Hammer- 
smith Bridge, listening to the remarks 
that were made, I decided that I quite 
knew how the English would have acted 
had Harvard won the race. 

And I felt that the bonds between 
England and America had been strength- 
ened by the four-mile struggle on the 
silver waters of the Thames, 



86 



OUR WAY AND THE BRITISH 





S NEAR as I can make out, 
we think the EngHsh very in- 
sular and opinionated because 
they will not admit that our 
ways are vastly preferable to their own 
and our nation a tremendous advance 
on England. 

87 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

Most of us who live in or near New 
York are perfectly willing to admit that 
New York represents the quintessence 
of civilization; that if a man has the 
good fortune to be born in New York 
there is no need for him to travel because 
he never will find anything to compare 
with Manhattan — not Brooklyn or The 
Bronx or Richmond, mind you, but just 
Manhattan — that the West has been 
hopelessly distanced and is still inhab- 
ited by a woolly race, and every morning 
he looks down with new contempt on 
all foreigners and provincials and thanks 
the Lord that he is not as insular and 
opinionated as the Englishman always is. 

But he has only to travel to find out 
that in the West they travel more com- 
fortably than we do in the East; that 
they get more for their money in their 
train travel than do we, and that, as they 
travel more, their ideas are broader and 
less provincial than ours. 

88 



OUR WAY 

Any open-minded man is bound to 
admit, once he has traveled in England, 
that he can do so more comfortably for 
less money than he can do it anywhere 
in the States — as they still persist in 
calling our country. 

Let me show by two examples and 
thus settle the question forever: 

We will suppose there are two young 
men of moderate means, the one a New 
Yorker who cannot afford Pullman cars, 
the other a Londoner who always travels 
third class. 

The New Yorker wishes to take a little 
trip of a hundred miles out into the 
country. What happens ? 

The night before his contemplated de- 
parture he hunts up an expressman, who 
perhaps has an office a mile or two away 
from the young man's house. I want to 
be perfectly fair in this statement. He 
tells the expressman to call next morning 
for his trunk and to carry it to the Grand 

89 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

Central Station. This the expressman 
agrees to do for fifty cents. 

Next morning the expressman is very 
late in coming, and the young man frets 
and fumes for fear he has been forgotten. 
However, he reflects on how much better 
the express system of New York is than 
any English system could be, and it is a 
great comfort to him. At last the ex- 
pressman comes and the trunk is borne 
away, and the young man follows on a 
surface-car, because a cab is out of the 
question on account of the expense. 

What is the inevitable result ? There 
is a blockade on the road, and the young 
man again frets and fumes until he 
realizes how much worse it must be in 
England — and then he gets out and 
runs, arriving at the station hot and 
breathless. 

After buying a ticket that costs him 
two and a half cents a mile he rushes to 
the baggage-room, a long two blocks 

90 



OUR WAY 

away in the great building, that he may 
check his trunk and thus relieve his 
mind of all thought of it. Has it come ? 
Oh, no, it has not come. Will it come 
soon ? The baggageman knows as lit- 
tle as he cares. 

He frets and fumes until it happens to 
come into his mind that he has read that 
in England they have no checking system, 
and pity for the benighted Englishman 
chokes every other emotion and he is en- 
abled to wait calmly until five minutes 
before train time, when the trunk comes, 
is almost demolished before his eyes by 
the careless expressman and upon his 
giving the baggage man a quarter tip 
he is assured that the bit of baggage will 
go out by his train and arrive with him. 

He puts the check into his pocket and 
sprinting to the train gets the only seat 
left beside a garlicky Italian who has 
been drinking instead of bathing. 

Just in front of him is a screaming and 
91 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

dirty baby who in the intervals between 
her paroxysms calls him papa, and 
behind him is a small boy who is ques- 
tioning his mother incessantly on sub- 
jects in which our traveler is not inter- 
ested. 

Arrived at last at his destination, hot 
and dusty and cross and cindery, where 
is the trunk that was checked through ? 
^Way down in the Grand Central Sta- 
tion, far, far away. 

They took the tip and gave the check, 
but they didn't run the trunk out. "'It 
will do on the next train'* is what they 
think down there. 

Our friend is visiting people who are a 
little up in the world, just a little up in the 
world, and they have come for him and 
his trunk that contains his dress suit, 
but it will be the next morning before 
he gets it, and he will need his dress suit 
just as soon as it is time to dress for 
dinner. 

92 



OUR WAY 

There let us leave him. We are not 
concerned with his further troubles. 

Let us now follow the experience of 
our young Londoner who is going away 
for a week-end. 

Does he spend the evening before his 
departure hunting up an expressman ? 
No, because they don't have expressmen 
in London. 

You can go to the *^ luggage in ad- 
vance '' man and have your trunk for- 
warded, but It will never occur to our 
English friend to do that. He goes to 
the theatre and whiles away his evening 
and next morning he chips his egg 
calmly and eats his bacon with zest and 
swallows his coffee leisurely at 8 o'clock, 
having made up his mind to take the St. 
Pancras train at 9 o'clock to a place a 
hundred miles out. 

Breakfast over, he goes to the front 
door of his lodging house and hails one 
of the boys who are always passing 

93 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

houses in London. Him he sends to the 
nearest standing to get a hansom cab. 

The tip to the boy is a penny, and he 
executes his commission with prompt- 
ness, and soon from the railings of the 
little park departs a London cabby and 
rattles up to the house of the young man 
in no time, his horse clicking off the dis- 
tance at a rate of speed he is prepared 
to keep up by the hour if necessary. 

''Is it a trunk, sir ^^ 

''Yes, please get me box and drive me 
to St. Pancras." 

"Very good, sir.*' 

The trunk is placed on the top of the 
hansom in two shakes of a very young 
lamb's tail, and the Londoner enters 
the hansom and is driven rapidly and by 
short cuts known only to drivers to St. 
Pancras. 

There a porter will buy the young 
man's ticket, for which he pays two 
cents a mile, will place his trunk in the 

94 



OUR WAY 

luggage van, having marked it for its 
destination, and will possibly find the 
young man a smoking compartment to 
himself in the fine, new corridor (aisled) 
train. And his tip for all this will be 
^^thruppence,^' or at most sixpence. 
His journey to the station in the hansom 
costs but a matter of sixty cents, includ- 
ing the trunk. 

He has perhaps tipped the driver six- 
pence for carrying his trunk downstairs, 
and he has been absolutely at his ease all 
the time. 

He is now in a third-class smoking car- 
riage with a comfortable seat in which he 
can loll back and look out of the window. 
There will be no squawling baby near 
him, for babies are not allowed in 
smoking carriages, or perhaps, I should 
say, that if they come, they do so at their 
own risk. 

It may be that a woman will come in, 
one who loves to see men smoking, but 

95 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

the chances are that if travel is light he 
will have the compartment to himself 
and can sleep or smoke or look at the 
scenery to his heart's content. Every 
few minutes the guard will request the 
pleasure of gazing once more at his 
ticket, but that is a favor that is soon 
granted, and who would grudge a guard 
one of his few pleasures ? 

Up in the luggage van, just ahead, or 
perhaps just behind, the young man's 
trunk is safely traveling, and when he 
arrives at the station and finds his 
friends there to meet him a porter will 
convey the trunk to the carriage for a 
tuppence tip. 

No worry, no delay, no Italian, no 
baby, no checking system. 

Suppose I were in Buffalo and wished 
to go to Boston for a visit, eventually 
taking the steamer at New York for 
London. We will say that I have a 
large trunk that I wish to send to 

96 



OUR WAY 

the steamer's hold from Buffalo. 

I can send it by express without me at 
something under $2^ or if it is more, all 
the better. I am willing to admit it will 
probably go through all right. 

But if I am in London and wish to go 
to Edinburgh on my way to Glasgow, 
whence I expect to sail to New York, and 
I wish to send my trunk to the steamer's 
hold, what do I do ? 

I paste a label on it, show my ticket to 
Edinburgh, and they send my trunk to 
Glasgow for sixpence, with a penny tip 
to the porter, and give me a receipt for it. 

In Chicago I leave four trunks in the 
station for two nights while I make a 
little detour with my suit case. On my 
taking them up again I have to pay 
twenty-five cents apiece per night for each 
trunk, or $2. 

In London I do the same thing, and it 
costs me just eightpence. As swindlers 
the English have much to learn. 

97 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

Mind you, I am no Anglomaniac. I 
see many ways in which the Englishman 
could be brought nearer to our high 
standard of kindliness and courtesy and 
political purity, but in the matter of 
making travel easy we are not in it, as I 
have shown so conclusively that it will 
be useless for any one to attempt to con. 
trovert me. 

I am an open-minded, unprejudiced 
American, and what I say goes. 



98 



TOO MUCH SHAKESPEARIANA 




SWANT to make a confession. 
I hate sightseeing, rm 
never in the mood for it. 
Sightseeing is the thing 
above all things that Fd like to do if I 
really cared for it. It is so stimulating 
to the imagination to stand before the 

tomb of a departed w^orthy of whom you 

99 



L OF Cn 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

heard for the first time the day before 
yesterday and reflect that five hundred 
years ago he stood on that very spot and 
w^alked about, using his legs just the 
same as you, of v^hom no one ever heard, 
use yours. At any rate it seems as if it 
ought to be stimulating to visit these 
haunts and resting places of departed 
great ones, but as a matter of fact it 
is not. 

Just when you are feeling absolutely 
ravenous and see a most enticing inn 
covered with green ivy and yellow 
thatch, you learn that you must forego 
luncheon and push on just because the 
tomb of the wicked Duke of Portchester 
is five miles up hill with the north wind 
in your face and something the matter 
with your bicycle and you no mechanic. 

It is good to be alive in foreign lands, 
it is good to be alive anywhere, for the 
matter of that, but sightseeing as sight- 
seeing, is the last thing a sightseer ought 

100 



TOO MUCH 

to attempt. Let the sights come unex- 
pected like. 

Admire the ruin, through a loophole 
of which you see the young moon, and 
next day when you learn that the name 
of the ruin is Levin Castle on Loch Levin 
from which Mary Queen of Scots 
escaped weeks and weeks and weeks 
ago you are bound to get a belated thrill, 
but go to see that ruin awheel, pushing 
your wheel up unclimable hills, and 
you'll wish that Mary had never at- 
tempted to leave the gloomy old hole 
when you finally reach it — ^with no moon 
in sight. 

Last week I ran across Massenger 
and we decided to do Stratford-on-Avon, 
where the man who wrote the plays that 
Bacon couldn't have written if you'd 
bribed him to do it, and wouldn't have 
written if he'd possessed the ability 
(despising players as he did), lived and 
died — and was born. 

101 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

Of course I refer to Shakespeare in 
spite of the convolutions of my English. 

It was a matter of fifty-five miles by 
wheel to Stratford from Wallingford, and 
we set out with light hearts, because I 
had read somewhere that that is the 
proper way to begin a journey. Now, as 
a matter of fact, Wallingford itself is full 
of the hallowedest kind of memories. 

Why, they don't ring the curfew until 
9 o'clock instead of 8, because when 
William the Conqueror landed there the 
first man he saw in the little crowd 
drawn up to welcome the genial Norman 
was an old school-fellow of his. 

"'What time do they ring the curfew, 
me old college chum ?" said William in 
his debonaire way. 

^'At 8, your Destroyership," said the 
man, who happened to be the Mayor of 
Wallingford. 

''Hereafter let it be 9 until clocks do 



no more run." 



102 



TOO MUCH 

And as clocks are still running the 
Wallingfordizens may play out in the 
street until all honest persons are sup- 
posed to have gone home. 

But, although I had made Wallingford 
my headquarters for some time, I had 
purposely refrained from going to the 
spot where all these footfalls fell because 
it is so much pleasanter to play tennis in 
this century than to dwell on the acts of 
the mighty in times that are pretty well 
gone forever as near as I can make out. 

But here we were going to visit the 
tomb of the real William the Conqueror, 
whose "Winter's Tale,'' with Ellen 
Terry as Hermioney was filling Beerbohm 
Tree's theatre every night, and causing 
honest Englishmen to laugh as hard as if 
they had never heard from their Amer- 
ican cousins that there is no such thing as 
English humor and that Englishmen 
can't see a joke. 

Where was I ^, 

103 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

Oh, about seventeen miles on our way 
to Stratford, with the north wind in our 
faces, but our hearts still light. You see 
the countryside in Oxfordshire is so beau- 
tiful that a fellow can't help feeling light- 
hearted, even going to visit a tomb. 

We passed quickly through Oxford, 
and so escaped seeing any of the show 
colleges. I've seen so many imitations of 
Oxford in American college towns that 
the real thing — ^well, we scorched through 
Oxford. 

(I feel that I will be set down as a Philis- 
tine if I don't stop long enough to say that 
some weeks before we had done Samuel 
Johnson's room and desk and the win- 
dow out of which he threw the shoes; 
also. Sir Joshua Reynolds's sepia win- 
dow (that was painted by some one else) 
and the Magdalen cloisters, and Wor- 
cester Gardens where, by the way, we 
saw a don who was fishing in the winding 
stream pull out a tench that weighed a 

104 



TOO MUCH 

full two pounds and which he said at the 
time weighed a good three. I dare say 
his fellow-dons heard it was four and a 
half.) 

It will be realized that having seen 
Oxford with all the proper emotions we 
weren^t going to see it again just for fun. 
So we pressed on and the north wind con- 
tinued to blow in a way to make even 
free wheeling something of an effort. 
When night fell we had done forty-eight 
miles and were tired out and Stratford 
ten miles away. 

''What if we should die in the night," 
said Massenger, ''without having seen 
Shakespeare's tomb V^ 

It was a depressing possibility, for 
now that I couldn't lay my hands on it 
I wanted to see it. 

But, having in mind what the poet had 
said about tired nature's sweet restorer, 
we resolved to try its virtue and put up in 
a hostelry that had been bedding and 

105 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

mealing people for five or six hundred 
years. 

Forty-eight miles in a north wind gives 
a fellov^ a light stomach, even if his 
heart has become somev^hat heavy, 
and we did justice to our simple but 
toothsome repast served by a pleasing 
maid and retired to sleep the sleep of 
absolutely good men. Oh, if men would 
only try absolute goodness as a cure for 
insomnia. 

Next morning we rose betimes — 
betimes is just the word to use in speak- 
ing of such a relic of bygone times as 
was our inn — and once more facing the 
north wind we continued our journey 
to the place that once ''echoed to the 
footsteps'' of "The Bard of Avon,'' to 
quote from twp writers whose names I 
forget. 

Ere that the sun in russet mantle clad 
had paced one twenty-fourth part of his 
appointed round we had covered the last 

106 



TOO MUCH 

ten miles of our pilgrimage and were 
come to Stratford. 

I will own that when I suddenly came 
on the bridge that had supported the 
growing weight of Shakespeare, boy, 
youth and man, I did feel as if I were in 
a sacred place, for both Massenger and 
myself are real fond of Shakespeare, and 
if they proved he never existed weM feel 
very sorry, because he has wormed his 
way into our hearts with his plays and 
poems. 

As we looked over the parapets of the 
bridge we saw beyond the waters of the 
Avon the church wherein his bones have 
been disturbed (in spite of the curse) at 
least once, and we fell to thinking on 
Marie Corelli, who lives in Stratford just 
as much as Shakespeare ever did. 

We didn't take things in the right 

order at all. We first visited his tomb 

and read the curse that some illiterate 

friend of his wrote for its embellishment. 

107 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

I wonder if the Baconians claim that 
quatrain for Bacon. 

The beautiful old church has some of 
the most painfully ugly stained glass 
windows that it ever befell my American 
eyes, used to Tiffany and La Farge's 
work, to look upon. Why not smash the 
glass and give old John an order? If 
they were there in Shakespeare's time 
they must have hurt his sense of color. 

They haven't the merit of being funny, 
either, as are the carvings on the miser- 
reres in the choir. Massenger said these 
last were hardly what would have been 
considered proper in the Second Congre- 
gational Church in his town, but they 
were certainly humorous, and many a 
choir boy must have whiled away his 
time through a droning service by in- 
specting them surreptitiously. 

One of them represented a man with a 
large sausage in his mouth. Alongside 
of him was a hungry face whose eye 

108 



TOO MUCH 

looked longingly at the Coney Island 
food, while a third head bore a lolling 
tongue that was fairly watering to get 
at the sausage. 

American admirers of Shakespeare 
have put up a memorial window, the 
work of contemporary Englishmen and 
quite the best window in the church. 
They had two opportunities, however, 
which they carefully missed; they might 
have given their order to an American 
firm, seeing it was to be a window, a 
form of art in which we excel, and they 
might have had the figures on it repre- 
sent Pistol and Bottom and Sir John Fal- 
staff and lago and Richard III. In- 
stead of that they put upon it our first 
Bishop, Seabury of Connecticut, and the 
Pilgrim Fathers and various other people 
that Shakespeare never heard of. 

I wonder, though, if some of those Pil- 
grim Fathers — before they were fathers 
—didn't run oflF to the theatre some 

109 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

nights and see Shakespeare's plays at the 
old Globe, with perhaps Shakespeare 
playing the Ghost, I like to think that 
the Pilgrims were linked with William 
in some such way. Afterward they put 
his plays out of their heads, but from 
time to time on the rockbound coast 
lines would come into their heads, and 
their hard old mouths would smile at the 
humor of the master craftsman. 

There is no doubt that Shakespeare 
has been longer in the church since his 
death than he ever was in life, but if he 
ever did go there in the flesh he must 
have enjoyed the humor of the various 
rude carvings and shuddered at the 
colors in the windows. 

We saw a good deal of Shakespeare in 
the Memorial Building, and a surpris- 
ingly large number of bad paintings, 
including one by an American portrait 
painter who shall be nameless — but he 

ought not to have shown his canvas to 

110 



TOO MUCH 

his janitor, let alone sending it to Strat- 
ford. They tell me he is successful 
among the disgustingly rich, and I can 
well believe it. Such a plentiful lack of 
imagination and such a generous use of 
expensive paint must make it's appeal 
among the nouveaux. 

We did not meet Marie Corelli. The 
loss was — no, Fm willing to say the loss 
was ours. 

She has already supplanted Shakes- 
peare in the affections of a large class of 
readers, and she deserves her success. 
Personally, I like Shakespeare better, 
and so does Massenger, but it's all a 
matter of taste. 

But much as we like Shakespeare we 

did get awfully sick of him in such large 

doses of Shakespeariana that he never 

heard of and that had nothing to do with 

him personally. How sick to death of 

the very name of Shakespeare must be 

the permanent dwellers in Stratford. 

Ill 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

They cannot go outside their doors with- 
out being asked to direct some American 
to the place where Shakespeare Hved 
or died or was married, or where 
he poached or crept unwillingly to 
school to absorb little Latin and less 
Greek. 

For our parts when we thought we had 
seen all there was to see of the haunts of 
Shakespeare, and had grown sick and 
tired and hungry, and were looking up a 
place in which to have cakes and ale; 
Massenger slapped his leg and said: 
"'We haven't seen his blamed old birth- 
place/* 

I felt like kicking Massenger, but it 
was a fact and it would not speak well 
for our love of literature if we returned 
to America without having seen the 
house that was the first great link 
between England and America. So we 
mounted our wheels and asked a resident 
the way, and he told us tiredly and re- 

112 



TOO MUCH 

sentfully, and soon we came to the place 
in which William first saw light — and a 
dark place it is. 

There we found more portraits of him 
as dissimilar to each other as his signa- 
tures are. And we heard more facts 
concerning him and felt that we ought 
to have proper emotions concerning 
him. But we just couldn't. I didn't 
care a rap what Ben Jonson said about 
his ''native woodnotes wild.'' I was 
hungry. 

We looked at the first folio, which 
looked exactly like every other first folio 
I ever saw, and I first began to see them 
out in Minneapolis and I've seen 'em in 
Oxford and in pretty nearly every place 
that boasts a library. What an edition 
they must have printed and how folks 
must have taken care of them. 

But now I looked crossly at the folio 
and wished that Bacon had written the 

113 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

play. For no one would ever have gone 
crazy over Bacon's birthplace, he not 
being the sort of man to inspire the per- 
sonal affection that Shakespeare inspires 
until you have the huge dose of him 
they give you in Stratford. 

We refused to even look in at the room 
where they weaned him, and with one 
hasty glance at the garden made up of all 
the flowers the great nature lover men- 
tions in his plays (and a most pretty 
idea it is), we hastened to an inn where 
we felt like eating every edible the great 
lover of eating mentions in his plays, but 
didn't. We did eat abundantly, how- 
ever, and over our cigars we thought of 
the days when we had loved Shakes- 
peare unhampered by any visions of the 
town of his birth. And then we de- 
parted! 

We had gone five miles toward beau- 
tiful and picturesque Warwick when 

114 



TOO MUCH 

Massenger slapped his leg again and 
said, ''We've forgotten something." 

I thought of my overcoat; but no, it 
was on the handle-bar. 

''WeVe forgotten to see Anne Hath- 
away's cottage and Nev^ Place, v^here he 
lived w^hen he had retired.'' 

I flung my cap in the air. Hurrah! 
I could still imagine v^hat Nev^ Place v^as 
like, and v^ould not have to be disap- 
pointed by a niggardly reality. As for 
Anne Hathaway's cottage, I never liked 
the w^ay she treated Shakespeare, and I 
would not pay her the compliment of 
looking at a cottage that may not have 
been hers after all. 

Fill your minds with pictures of 
Stratford and read the amiable fellow's 
plays, but don't go to see his haunts 
and homes unless you are insatiable 
sightseers. 

How he must laugh at the spectacle of 
leg-weary Americans who never read a 

115 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

play of his and who think ^^RicheHeu*' 
the best play of his they ever saw acted 
(ignoring poor Bulwer's claims com- 
pletely), poring over his memorabilia 
and going into raptures over the hideous 
windows and reading Marie Corelli 
harder than ever when they return to 
America! It is to laugh pleasantly! 



116 



"CROKY" VERSUS MOTORING 



j^:^/4 




^<m2^y^. 




F the two sports I prefer motor- 
ing to croquet. One day in 
England, the weather being 
very chilly, I wished to do something 
athletic in order to keep myself warm. 
My wheel had a puncture that baffled 
me — oh, those English flints! — and the 
tennis court of my host was being used 
by four brilliant players whose storage 



117 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

batteries of enthusiasm were warranted 
to last till dark. 

In my extremity I turned to croquet, 
and asked a young man who knew the 
game whether he would try a round with 
me just to warm my blood. 

Now, in the days of Reconstruction 
in the South, when Germany was whip- 
ping France, I used to play croquet — 
with the accent on the ''kay^' — up in 
New England and we used to run 
through nine wickets or arches and back 
again, hitting two stakes and sometimes 
adding to the excitement of the game 
by making a cage of the middle wicket 
by topping it with another wicket set at 
right angles to it. 

It was a game calculated to bring out 
all that was irritable in a human being, 
and I fancy that it must have been as 
easy as pie to play it, for people of all ages 
from seven to seventy accused each other 
of cheating and Roquet-croqueted from 

118 



"CROKY" VS. MOTORING 

dawn till dark on village greens, park 
lawns and city back yards. 

But croquet as she was played in the 
'70s and croquet as she is played in Eng- 
land to-day — croquet with the accent 
on the ''cro'' — are two different things, 
and as a stimulator of the circulation of 
the blood I am afraid that I cannot say 
much for the English game. 

I took my mallet, a short-handled, 
wide-headed one of greater weight than 
the old kind, and I took my ball, stained 
blue all over, and my opponent took his 
red ball and his mallet and we made our 
way to the carpet of velvet, or, to speak 
strictly, the lawn, where I found six 
wickets, called hoops, with the accent 
on the '^hoo,'* and two stakes which were 
called sticks. Anything to be different. 
Whydidn'ttheycallthe mallets hammers ? 

The hoops were so ridiculously narrow 
that I fancied it would need strength to 
force a ball through. 

119 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

The day was raw and I was chilly and 
anxious to begin, but my opponent cour- 
teously took first play in order to give me 
a chance to play on him, and with a skill 
worthy of all admiration he sent his ball 
through the first hoop and got into good 
position to play the second next turn. 

That was my first inkling that it was a 
slow game. It was three by my watch 
and the wind was blowing raw. 

It being my turn to play I placed my 
ball in the proper position and let drive 
and missed the wicket — hoop, I mean, 
with an inaccuracy heaven-born. 

My turn had ended and my opponent 
now hit me, and after deliberating with 
knitted eyebrows as to what to do with me 
he sent me to the uttermost parts of the 
lawn, and shivering I went after my ball 
and then watched him make the second 
arch. 

I now came back — by his advice — and 

got into pretty good position for going 

120 



"CROKY" VS. MOTORING 

through my arch. He told me that I 
ought to go through easily if he did not 
put me out of commission. 

He now put on a pair of gloves, as his 
hands were cold, and after mentally 
going through all the possible strokes he 
could make he decided to tear me away 
from my present comfortable position 
in front of the first arch, and as I stood 
there shivering under the bleak Septem- 
ber sky he hit my ball and knocked it the 
length of the lawn and then went through 
hoop number three and got into position 
for number four. 

With a feeling that I would never give 
up trying to win, no matter what hap- 
pened, I sent my ball back across the 
lawn and by good luck I got into such 
position that a tap would win me the 
passage of the arch. 

But my opponent was also playing to 

win and he knocked me out of position 

and then sent me to the limit in a new 

121 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

direction. He then made two hoops, 
planning each stroke with a deliberation 
that sent chills up my already cool spine. 

I would have jumped and shouted but 
that would have been too cowboyish and 
undignified for my friend, who was extra 
English, so I refrained. The rooks were 
cawing coldly and blackish clouds swept 
across the gray sky and the wind in the 
yew trees made a Novemberish sound. 

I glanced at the four men who were 
having a battle royal of tennis. How 
warm and happy they looked! They 
were doing something, while I had not 
even begun to get ready to commence to 
do anything. 

I looked at my watch. I had been 
half an hour trying for a chance to enter 
the game. I shivered and my opponent 
told me that he must make the six arches 
— hoops — twice before the game was at 
an end. 

Once more I tried for position and this 

122 



"CROKY" VS. MOTORING 

time did not get it, but that very fact left 
me untouched by my opponent, who gave 
ten minutes' chess thought to the prob- 
lems on the lawn and then missed a hoop. 

This encouraged me. Now I would 
go through. I took careful aim and hit 
the ball softly and did no more than 
get into position to go through next 
time. 

But there was never to be a next time 
for me. I hadn't begun to play and I 
didn't begin to play at all. 

We were on that chilly lawn for two 
solid hours and in that time my oppo- 
nent made every hoop and rested from 
his labors when he had hit the stick, and 
the last stroke I made I just missed that 
first hoop by six inches. I think that 
with practice I could have made it. 

Chilled to the marrow, I reverently 
laid my mallet away in its box forever, 
while my friend assured me that I would 
make a good player because I was not 

123 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

too cock-sure, as so many beginners 
were. He said like so many beginners 
were, because that's considered good 
English — in England. 

But "croky" is not for me. I took a 
brisk walk to avert a chill, and when my 
blood was once more circulating the 
cawing of the rooks sounded friendly and 
the dull skies gave promise of merry 
sunshine on the morrow. 

And I then and there resolved that 
nothing should ever tempt me to stand 
outside a hoop knocking in vain for an 
entrance. 

To take up a more cheerful topic. 

Why is it that when we are in Rome 
we do as the Romans do ^ Why will I 
play tennis on Sunday in England when 
I refuse to do it in New Jersey for fear 
of what my neighbors will say ? Why 
is it that when I return from England 
I do not acknowledge that I did play 
tennis on Sunday in England ? 

124 



"CROKY" VS. MOTORING 

Take also the matter of motor- 
speeding. 

At home I have always been one of the 
mouth-frothers at the unconscionable 
speeding of our motors. Every time one 
has passed my house at the rate of 
thirty miles an hour or more I have asked 
whoever happened to be near me: 

"What are we coming to .^ Do we 
own the roads or do a privileged few 
own them } Shall we offer up our 
children to these juggernauts, meekly 
submitting to express train service on 
suburban streets, or shall we appeal to 
our legislators to put an end to any speed 
above ten miles an hour" ? 

And my neighbors have always an- 
swered me in like spirit; also frothing, 
and have assured me that no children 
of theirs should willingly be offered 
up to this Moloch of the twentieth 
century. 

And then we have retired to our lawn- 
125 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

mowing or our leaf raking and the froth 
has dried on our lips. 

We look on Scotland as a land of rigid 
morality and potent whiskey. We do 
not think of it as a law-breaking country. 
We have allowed ourselves to be lectured 
by Bobbie Burns and Thomas Carlyle 
and we look to Scotland for examples of 
high living. 

But how travel broadens the mind and 
removes the blinders from the eyes! 

When I reached Scotland I fell a victim 
to the charms of law-breaking. 

It came about in this way: 

Knowing my host to be a Freekirker 
and a law-abiding man, when he asked 
me if I would mote, I beamed. 

I thought that a little ten miles an 
hour would be good for the liver and 
would enable me to see more of Scotland 
than I could see from a hansom or even 
the top of a double-decker. 

What happened to the simple Jersey- 
126 



"CROKY" VS. MOTORING 

man — not born there, you understand — 
who was in the habit of frothing at the 
mouth at sight of speeding motors ? 

Why almost at the moment of stepping 
into the dark green machine the lust for 
speed was born in me and I longed to see 
what my host could do in the little 
matter of Scotch law^-breaking. 

I was afraid that he didn't have it. 

I mean the lust for speed. 

But he did, thank fortune. Not im- 
moderately, but stimulatingly. 

Oh, how I frothed at the mouth when 
I saw the poor fools in villages who 
would persist in getting in our way! Why 
didn't they leave the road free to us ? 
We ran a risk of puncturing our tires 
on them, for your Scotchman is apt to be 
sharp-visaged. 

Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, 
seventy, eighty, ninety, I dare say a hun- 
dred miles an hour we went. What mat- 
tered anything but the eating of space ? 

127 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

I roared with joy. I dared people to 
come out and be run over. We always 
did the job so quickly that most of them 
didn't know what had happened. The 
wind fanned my cheeks so vibratingly 
that it played tunes in my hair. 

We passed law-abiding people going 
along at a foolish fifteen miles an hour — 
creeping like snails escaping from Phila- 
delphians — and we jeered at them. 
What's the use of riding in a motor if 
you've got to observe laws ? 

Once a man who was going only about 
forty miles an hour wouldn't get out of 
our way and we tumbled him over a cliff 
and went on our way without looking 
back. 

I, who all my life, had gone out of my 
way to find laws that I might keep them, 
was now enticing my host to break every 
law he could think of. 

The Highlands dashed past us, peak 
succeeding unto peak, and we had no 

128 



"CROKY" VS. MOTORING 

sooner maimed a drove of sheep than we 
were tossing Highland cattle of the Rosa 
Bonheur type over stone fences. 

Oh, it was glorious, and when it was 
all over and we had — so my host told 
me — covered three hundred or less miles 
in three hours or less, I felt exultant, I 
felt like David when he slew his 10,000 — 
although we had not done anything like 
that. I had defied the law in Scotland 
and I didn't care who knew it. 

But now that I am home again am I 
one of the speeders ^ No. I do not 
own an autom.obile, and I expect to sit 
on my piazza and froth at the mouth as 
of yore when these unconscionable speed 
fiends pass my house above the limit set 
down in Jersey law. 

I have had my middle-aged fling and I 

am now a law-abiding citizen once more. 

But I shall not soon forget the way we 

tore around village corners and hurled 

chickens into second-story windows or 

129 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

sent beldams scurrying into picturesque 
alleys, or whipped wheels off of cheaply- 
constructed motors. 

It was splendid because it was so law- 
less, and I was not in my native land. 
But I don't see how my host dared do it. 
He lived there. 



130 



ENGLAND HEATS UP 




Jl AM one of those abnormally nor- 

I I mal persons who keep their houses 

V y at just the right temperature 

through fall and winter. By just 

the right temperature I mean from 68 

to 70 degrees Fahrenheit. 

Of course, there are occasions when I 

forget the furnace and then the mercury 

131 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

drops to 50 degrees, and sometimes my 
children stoke it playfully and then it 
mounts to 80 degrees, but as a general 
thing my house is so comfortable (to me) 
that my American friends shiver when 
they come to see me, and my English 
friends ask me if I won't please open a 
window or two. 

Running my house with such sweet 
reasonableness it will readily be realized 
that I am in Tophet whenever I call on 
any of my neighbors, all of whom own 
blast furnaces run at rush order heat. 
And when I go to New York City it is 
like going to . 

I want to stop right here to say that 
New York offices ought to have tropical 
plants growing in them just to show the 
effete equator what plant life can do if it 
is properly heated. 

On trains and in offices and in the 

homes of my friends and acquaintances 

and enemies here in this country that 

132 



ENGLAND HEATS UP 

gave me birth, I wander around with my 
beak open and my wings extended like a 
hen in July. My blood rushe citedly 
through my head like a law-defying 
motor-car, and I daily wonder that 
death by heat prostration does not deci- 
mate the winter dwellers in American 
buildings. 

If it were not for the look of the thing I 
would strip to my undershirt like a man 
in a casting shop. But the proprieties 
are ever before me and I pant — in 
coat and vest. No wonder men die 
of pneumonia each year who never 
died before. How anyone escapes I 
don^t know. 

They tell of a business man in a New 
York fur — I mean office, who had not led 
the sort of life that leads one to the 
pearly gates, and when he died he went 
to the place that used to be spelled with a 
dash when I was a boy. 

He had been gone scarcely a day when 
133 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

his wife received a postal from him 

dated: 

Chaudville, Gehenna, 

July the Hotth. 
Dear Maria: Send me my winter clothes. 
It's chilly. Billy. 

Things being as they are in New York 
and the rest of America, that is, the 
American people being under pledge to 
the coal barons to burn three times as 
much coal as they need and pretend that 
they like the consequent heat, it struck 
me that when I went to England I would 
find the temperature of their houses in 
the early autumn just the thing that 
would appeal to me. 

"These English are sensible in their 
ways," said I. "They not only have 
raised comfortable traveling to the 
dignity of a science, but they know how 
to make abnormally normal people com- 
fortable in the chill days of early Octo- 
ber. 

"I will spend tne winter in England," 

134 



ENGLAND HEATS UP 

said I enthusiastically, ''and not only be 
comfortable in private houses, but in 
London offices as well, for the English- 
man is one of whom coal is not a master, 
but coals are his servant/' 

So after the unusual heat of last sum- 
mer in England I stayed on into the fall 
and visited several persons who made 
me welcome in the hearty English 
fashion and bade me do as I pleased, 
when I pleased, with what I pleased. 

One day in October, having gone up 
into Warwickshire to spend a little time 
with congenial ones, the mercury began 
to fall and the glass, like Jill, came 
tumbling after. 

In England the glass is always do- 
ing something. We in America seldom 
bother with a barometer, and if we have 
one ten to one we don't know how to 
read it, but your Englishman is lone- 
some if he hasn't a glass somewhere near 
at hand which he can consult, and when 

135 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

you meet him in the morning and he 
gives you the inevitable and vigorous 
hand-shake he says : 

*'The glass is rising. We'll be able 
to play tennis without umbrellas to-day." 

Or ''the glass is falling. I suppose 
you'll be getting out your galoshes.'' 

Englishmen scorn overshoes. They 
wear shoes so thick that even an English 
rain gives up trying to penetrate the 
soles, so where's the need of rubbers t 

The glass fell and so did the mercury 
until the sky was full of great windy, cold 
clouds and the air bit shrewdly. 

"Ah," said I, thinking for the nonce 
that I was at home, ''I must start the 
furnace going to-night." 

When I returned from the walk I took 
each morning I said to my host: 

"Getting cold. Going to light your 
furnace .^" 

He lowered his head and looked at me 
sort of horizontally. 

136 



ENGLAND HEATS UP 

"In the first place/' said he, "it's too 
early in the season on October 5 to start 
a furnace, and in the second place, 
furnaces don't grow in this part of the 
country. I doubt if even the Earl of 
Warwick has one. You're not cold, are 
you t 

I, fresh from my invigorating walk, 
was not cold, but I wanted to be before- 
hand; it's a heaven-born attribute of 
mine. 

"To-morrow's likely to be very chilly," 
said L 

And the next day was indeed chilly, 
damp and chilly, penetratingly damp 
and chilly, goosefleshly chilly and dankly 
damp. 

The house is a stone one, of course — 
and when I woke up the next morning 
and looked at the glass I saw that it had 
fallen so low as to be positively disgrace- 
ful. Gusts of rain spattered on the pane 
and the mercury registered 40 degrees. 

137 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

The wind blew autumn leaves all over 
the place as much as to say: '^Aren't the 
trees foolish ? In the summer when it's 
hot they're fully clothed, but in winter 
they're naked." 

It was a thought that had often oc- 
curred to me in my poetic moments, so I 
agreed with the wind, and jumping out 
of bed I went to the bureau to get out my 
winter underclothes. 

I had left them in New Jersey. 

This was vexing, but I put on three 
suits of summer ones and a sweater, and 
then I went down to the morning room 
to warm my hands at the open fire. 

But the fire hadn't opened yet. 

The front door, however, was wide 
open and dear old Boreas was playing 
"The North Wind Doth Blow," with 
variations, through the hall and the rest 
of the house. 

I'm warm-blooded, but when it's 

down to forty I want a fire, even if the 

138 



ENGLAND HEATS UP 

name of the month happens to be August. 
And if it's up to 80 in January I give my 
furnace a holiday and dress Hke the 
Queen of the May. 

But when my host came in from a 
stroll in the rain and saw my bulgy ap- 
pearance, he said: ''You look like a 
trussed chicken. What's the matter?" 

Just then my teeth began to chatter, 
and I said as I shook hands with him — 
if you don't shake hands with your host 
every morning in England he thinks you 
don't care for him any more : 

''Dud-dud-dud-don't you think a 
hearth fuf-fuf-fire would look well ? 
Brrhh!" 

He burst into a genial laugh. 

"A hearth fire in October! What's 
the man thinking of .^" 

*'Just to take the chill off the house, 

I'm used to a furnace at home, you 

know." 

''Yes, that's just the trouble with you 
139 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

Americans; you overheat your houses." 

And I am considered a cold-air crank 
by my neighbors. 

However, being hospitality itself, he 
ordered the maid to start a fire in the 
morning-room, and when it was blazing 
with the fury of a box of safety matches 
he opened the windows, and all the mem- 
bers of the family when they came down 
to shake hands all round said: 

"Oh, dear, how sweltering! What 
did you start a fire in October for ? Do 
you want to make us tender, father ?" 

"It's a little American custom Fm 
imitating," said paterfamilias with a 
good-tempered smile at me, and I felt 
like Gulliver among the Bobdigna- 
gians. 

It wasn't long before it began to get 

damp in spite of the false alarm on the 

hearth and I ventured to shut one 

of the windows, but my host said pater 

nally : 

140 



ENGLAND HEATS UP 

"My dear boy, if you're going to spend 
the winter in England youVe got to get 
used to sane methods. You overheat 
your houses in America to such an extent 
that I wonder your children have any 
stamina at all." 

"I know," said I, '"that most people 
do, but Fve always prided myself on 
being an exception. I never let the 
temperature rise above 70 degrees if I 
can help it." 

Frightful!" said he, explosively. 
Absolutely frightful, man! You lay 
yourself open to be the prey of every 
germ that flies, walks or creeps. Sixty 
degrees is ample if you're sitting still and 
55 degrees if you're moving." 

I went and looked at the thermometer. 
It was 54 degrees. So I began to go 
through the military setting-up exercises. 

He was pleased. 

"That's it. Struggle against your 

effeminate desire for warmth. Why, if 

141 






AN ENGLISH TUB 

you're chilly here in October what would 
you be in December ?" 

'' Kind of morguish, I guess/' said I. 

I went up to my room and found a 
couple more suits of underclothes and 
put them on — under. Then I put on my 
overcoat, and the breakfast bell ringing 
I went down to breakfast and had a 
warm meal. 

After breakfast I sat in the morning- 
room and the fire snapped jeeringly at 
me, as if to say, "What are our flames 
among such winds.?" and I said, ''Not 
much." 

Pretty soon my host went out for his 
morning walk, rubberless and umbrella- 
less and the rain drizzling down in a way 
to kill the gate receipts at a dog fight, and 
as soon as he had gone out the fire went 
out. Eye servant! It was actually 
ashamed to burn in an English house as 
early as October. 

And the worst of it was that those 
142 



ENGLAND HEATS UP 

English people looked and felt warm. 
And I've always prided myself on mv 
good circulation. 

All day long fresh and damp air poured 
through the house and sang '^ stone walls 
do not a prison make'' and I wished I 
had been born in England so that I 
might have appreciated my benefits- 
But before nightfall I began to long for 
the dead, dry heat of a New York busi- 
ness office. 

Sunday morning everybody overslept 
except myself. I was wakened by a per- 
son sneezing and found that it was I. 
The glass was still falling and the mer- 
cury was oversleeping to such an extent 
that it hadn't risen for two days. 

'^ Dear man," said I, when I met my 
host and shook hands with him, ^'you 
have been so kind to me that I will never 
forget it while life lasts. English hospi- 
tality is the thing that made the invention 

of the word necessary, but I do not wish 

143 



AN ENGLISH TUB 

to lie forever in an English churchyard 
and have the rooks tell me I froze to 
death. Lead me to a steamer that is 
going to America that I may live the 
foolish life to v^hich my ancestry con- 
demns me. I would fain v^arm myself 
before I die.'' 

And nov^ I v^ander around in New 
York offices with my beak open and my 
wings extended, already forgetting that 
I was cold in England. 



The End. 



144 



THE 



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